It is very likely that most people who are reading these blogs, have grown up with dryers. In England though, where I grew up they made a rather late entrance. In our family, which was middle class, the dryer made itself known to us when my sister and I were teenagers. I think the English weather might have had something to do with this decision. English summers, and winters, can be a depressing tally of damp days with no relief. So my father bought a dryer. Really what option did he have? His two teenage daughters were on the cusp of a real social life, albeit that the village offered very little life of any description let alone social life for teens – the towns had just appeared on our radar!
At first we all thought the dryer a novelty, and it really did improve the flow of laundry in the house. Slowly though the convenience of this thing became apparent. Friday and Saturday were the big nights. Big nights required the right outfit. Sometimes the right thing was in the closet, other times – well what we wanted was not there, and on inspection needed washing and drying within the hour! Things can be swilled through quickly, but drying them was always a problem until the dryer came along – whow, we could decide on the correct wardrobe at 5 pm and have both rinsed and dryed all by 7pm! Well you can imaging how great this was. That is until the electricity bill arrived!
I remember conversations about minimum numbers of items that could be dried; getting our act together as far as what we needed for the weekend; and I think we were offically banned from using it for a few weeks until the message got through to us.
Great inventions in the laundry world are indeed a bonus to life, but as we found out, they can be obused. There is a price to pay for the convenience, and yes, we did finally learn that dryers were useful but we also found out that they are a disaster for a ‘need it dried now’ sweater!
October 9, 2007 at 9:19 am |
I’m committed to line-drying my clothes, weather permitting, but I’m worried that I use as much energy as ever because I find it necessary to iron the clothes I’m wearing each morning, even while working in a casual attire office.
Do you have any suggestions for minimizing wrinkles on line-dried clothes?
October 19, 2007 at 6:29 am |
Dawn
That is a legitimate problem, but the amount of energy you use ironing will be reduced if you do a bunch at one time. Like a dryer, the time to heat up the iron for just one item is wasteful. Doing 15 -30 minutes at a time, to give you a full week’s worth of work clothes will help reduce the overal ironing cost.
It also helps to fold them when they come off the line, just as you would when they come out of the dryer.
When I iron, I do about an hour at a time and that is sufficient to do most of the family laundry (there are 4 of us). To dry these in the dryer would take about 6 loads, each running for 45-60 minutes. So I really think I am saving overall.