I love my clothesline. I enjoy hanging clothes out and I adore the fresh line-dried smell that lingers on them. My regular readers will know that I have a bit of an obsession about this, actually. Once we get to November though, it gets trickier to get a load of laundry completely dry outside and if it's very cold, not only do the clothes freeze, so do my hands. Winter starts for me when I give up and start hanging clothes inside. Hanging clothes inside is definitely second best - they don't get that fresh air smell, but there are no bird dropping worries, either. I have a pretty strong aversion to using the dryer as it seems not unlike burning money to dry clothes instead of just letting ordinary air (which in winter around here could always use a bit of moisture) do the job. In addition to the environmental and financial benefits of line drying, slackers like me enjoy the fact that clothes do not get more wrinkled the longer they linger on the drying rack, unlike the dryer where a few hours of neglect results in the dreaded dryer wrinkles.
I think we are unique in North America in regarding the coal-fired (or nuclear-powered, here in Ontario) clothes dryer as an essential item in the home. Even I, with all my evangelical line drying, have one. Obviously, our electricity rates are still too low if ordinary people still use them. I wonder what other coal-fired gadgets we'll come to find ludicrous instead of necessary when energy prices are double or triple what they are now.
By the way, a really great website about saving electricity is Michael Bluejay's Saving Electricity site. It is loaded with information and a fair bit of attitude ("only losers set their AC below 80") which makes it a pretty entertaining read, not to mention very useful.
Ok, I promise this is the last post about drying clothes. Really.
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