It blows my mind Americans living in warm parts of the country tumble dry their clothes. We dry clothes outside between March and October in the UK, saves energy and money, and makes your clothes last longer (compared to a uk tumble drier at least!)
I live in the UK and the fact that a lot of people here don't use a tumble dryer is blowing my mind. It's so humid most of the year that normally when I put clothes on an indoor rack they take 2-3 days to fully dry, by which time they develop this characteristic musky smell. And dry outside? When? Inbetween the frequent rain?
No thank you. Tumble dryer is where it is. And yes, on a nice summer day sure, I also hang my clothes in the garden - but for 95% of the year that's not really an option, and I don't want to wait days for my clothes to be dry and my house to have this specific smell that develops in high humidity.
Do they? Growing up in New England we had a rack like the one in the article (first time I've heard them described as "European") and a clothesline and we still used an electric dryer. Depending on the size of your family, it's a lot of work to hang everyone's clothes to dry.
Man, even in south america driers are a desirable appliance. Most of time we use the sun, but the kids need dry clothes in the dry season too!
The only difference, is that separated driers are kind of considered obsolete here and everybody wants a washer-drier korean machine from samsung or LG.
Normally 20 eur in lidl, assuming they’re there this week.
(Everything is eventually sold at lidl, nominally a food store, but also carries a revolving selection of inexpensive random stuff, from tools and hardware, to housewares and clothes, computer bits, sound level meters, and power washers. And arc welders, roughly every 6 months)
They're definitely light duty tools, suitable for occasional use. They're not that much worse than the low end stuff in the big box HW stores for 2x the price. But they're not tools you're going to use for decades.
One of the keyphrases is hidden elsewhere on this blog[0]:
> Most significantly, I think, it means that we have been entirely able to get by without owning a car for the past three years.
This, in my opinion, is probably the most significant difference between living in the USA and Europe (the other two being medical care and, when relevant, higher education).
I find my towels get stiff and dense when I let them air dry (as opposed to soft and fluffy when I machine dry.) Am I doing something wrong or is this something people just get used to?
Towels get stiff after air drying because they were too soaked with water.
You should try "spin wash cycle" for 10 mins after washing (not sure about the translation, essorage in French - dewatering).
So you have the best of both worlds:
Your towels air dry quickly, and are fluffy, you use far less energy than drying machine, and your towels / clothes are preserved.
If you've always air-dried, there's nothing to get used to ...
I guess I can see the appeal of soft fluffy towels, but I actually prefer mine stiff. I can't justify or explain it, but ... I do. Sheets as well .. thick linen sheets, air-dried so they're kinda hard ... mmmm.
Somehow, I want to answer "neither". I find air dried towels much more absorbent and pleasant to use after a shower. They give that nice feeling of "OK and now I'm dry.", much like a bar of soap leaves that feeling of "OK and now my hands are clean" (especially compared to a very oil-rich liquid soap).
But I didn't have to get used to this, I just immediately preferred it.
My mom used a dryer (I'm in the US) but my dad insisted that the sheets be air dried on the line outside. If he was home for wash time he would do that for her. After she figured that out wash day was always on a Sunday.
I laughed at her description of the drying rack 'holding more than a regular load of clothing'. My (American) clothes washer easily holds more than twice what she has displayed.
What? Mine is hollow steel tubes + wires, 20€, it will hold about 12 using only the center section and it won't be even close to abuse. I only see it bending if putting heavy clothes on the side racks.
What you can physically fit isn’t the same as what they can actually dry effectively. Typically their sized so a washing machine is half the capacity of a dryer because you can fill a washing machine 2/3 up but you only want a dryer at 1/3 capacity. https://blog.bellinghamelectric.com/dryer-buying-guide
In other words 50 adult blue jeans would take roughly a 75 cubic foot dryer to dry effectively. Which probably exists in some industrial settings but I doubt you have that at home.
all the places I grew up in england, we would have a wooden rack (just some wooden slats attached to kind of metal hangers) with a small winch above the boiler in the boiler room. When the washing was done, my mum would put the washing on this rack, either between the slats or hung from hangers. It was obviously quite effective and efficient, but I don't miss it at all with a modern dryer.
Having moved to the US recently though, I do miss integrated washer-dryers that I could set to complete by the time I woke up so I got to wake up to warm clothes for flights and meetings I was stressed about. They're totally absent in the US, and people who have used them give me weird anecdotes about how 'they don't dry clothes properly' or 'they don't let you go through as many clothes as fast' -- while the latter may be true, the washer-dryer means the entire process happens without you being there, like if you were asleep.
Can't believe they don't have washer-dryer combos in US, of all countries. Another argument I heard is that they're not as long-lived as separate appliances, but mine (Bosch) is still going strong after 12 years or so (save for a plastic door handle I broke apart early on in anger when the thing wouldn't open unless waiting for a minute after program abort ;) Bit more expensive than a plain washer though for sure.
In average, americans, even if not overweight, are pretty big fellows. Try fitting lots of XXXL clothes in a Korean Washer-Drier that usually limits loads to some 8kg when using the drying cycle, even if the machine is rated to 12kg for washing, and you'll see the point of a separate drier.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I say "Americans give me weird anecdotes". 'Americans can't use washer-dryers because they're more fat than everyone else in the world' has got to be the strangest case of American exceptionalism I've ever had to read.
Our laundry loads generally split out between stuff you can put in the dryer without damaging it (much), and the rest gets hung on one of these racks. As soon as the weather improves, it generally all goes outside on a pair of lines strung across the garden, plus a rack (for smaller stuff more prone to falling off a line, e.g. socks).
The drier was an absolute godsend with babies in the house. The rate at which we had to clean and dry baby clothes absolutely outstripped the clothes' ability to dry on a rack (and there's only so much of your life you'd want to devote to hanging up tiny socks, bibs etc...)
An electric dryer is money well spent. As is a dishwasher. I'd literally pay a multiple of what I currently pay for the convenience - both time and labor saved.
Electricity is currently very expensive in Europe, and in many countries electricity comes from burning coal. So a device where clothes can dry without using electricity makes a lot of sense to me.
In December, many households in Sweden had electricity bills of 10000-15000 SEK, or more (~$1100-1600 or ~€900-1400).
Okay, wow. In Eastern Europe it's pretty cheap compared to that (actually, the number you gave is higher than many peoples salaries here). I think I'd be using a rack in your case as well.
Given the cost, it seems like there would be a big opportunity to install geothermal to bring that cost down. The payback would be quick with electricity costs like that.
There can still be obstacles though. Quite a few houses here lack a distribution system for the radiators. Those radiators are directly connected to the electricity system. I.e. the house lacks a water-based heat circulation system (or similar). One could retrofit such a system, but then it’s about double the cost compared to only installing the geothermal pump. The background to this situation is partly that in the 70s, the government required houses to be built this way. Electricity was cheap back then, we had lots of nuclear and water-power and wanted to get away from oil.
Another thing to keep in mind that even a geothermal system requires some electricity to run – and they are not terribly effective when the weather is very cold outside.
We've got an overhead airer on the balcony which is great during not-winter, especially since we're in a wind-trap corner. But it's pretty useless when the temperature is low (because stuff doesn't dry / goes solid) and also because the local wasps make a habit of hiding in the clothes for warmth. Then we resort to the radiators indoors because they'll be on anyway.
Drying by using fusion power from the sun is convenient only if you live in a warm climate mostly in southern Europe.
And even in that case, e.g. Cyprus where we enjoy 320+ sunny days a year there comes a time around January/February that it can take up to 2 days for clothes to dry.
You don't need sunlight for drying clothes. They dry just fine indoors during the Norwegian winter here. Does that take more than 24 hours? Sure, but that's no problem if you plan a bit ahead.
Insulation of course works both for cold and heat but old buildings definitely have very bad insulation, new ones build the past 10 years have more stricter standards. Generally everything is built for high temperatures and with cooling in mind so many buildings prioritize airconditioning over efficient centralized heating systems.
If humidity is low you can even dry clothes outside in freezing temperatures. Not exactly fast and might not be good for longevity of the fabrics if it's windy, that's called sublimation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(phase_transition)
Humidity from drying clothes is not exactly good for you or your home. That also assumes heating to dry them in the first place i.e. you need to increase consumption to account for the extra cooling from the drying clothes, turns out you may as well use a dryer and get the job done (at least for the cold months).
For comparison though in the summer, drying a washer load takes around 2 hours during the day and maybe 4-5 during the night.
>That also assumes heating to dry them in the first place
You don't need heating either. I dry my bedsheets in a room with clotheslines in the roof of my apartment building. That has like 5-10C right now and they dry just fine.
Also humid air is the least thing I'd worry about in Winter.
True for the summer, we dry them inside in the winter and it does get a bit humid, but it doesn't really get much colder from drying the clothes. The humidity isn't great, though.
I don't like this type of racks, there are much better taller racks that hold more clothes and are sturdier for almost the same money. These small ones tend to break if you put heavy blankets on it.
from a north american now in europe that lives in a 2 room apartment and hangs his blankets weekly on the curtain pole (rack to small, no space) no... just no.
This article immediately raised some "journalistic red flags" for me. I've been reading articles more critically than the average person for decades, and I immediately notice when someone is pushing an agenda and "bending" the facts without outright lying.
For example, take this sentence: "a recent study in the US indicated that Americans spend $9 billion dollars per year (!) on the electricity used to dry clothes."
Billions of dollars is bad(!), right?
But a quick division[1] with the population of the US shows that this is just $27.30 per capita per annum, or about $2 per week per household of 2 adults and 2 kids. Essentially nothing.
Mind you, I have the exact same model of drying rack that the author does and I use it regularly.
But is it necessarily better than an electric dryer?
No.
Racks have significant downsides:
- If the weather is too humid, the clothes won't dry fast enough and end up smelling of mildew. We then have to rewash them, which is wasteful and damages the clothes.
- Clothes dried on the track often end up stiff as cardboard or very wrinkled, and then need ironing, which also uses electricity. Clothes often come out of the dryer ready to wear, especially t-shirts. The heat and motion of the dryer fluffs them and removes wrinkles to a significant degree.
- Those racks tip over all too easily. We can't put it out on the balcony without propping it up with some chairs, the slightest breeze will knock it over. Once wet clothes hit the dirty outside floor, they have re-washed!
- They're a hazard to children. They not only fall over easily, but they tend to fold up in the process with enough force to break fingers or trap limbs. We're probably going to have to get rid of it entirely now that our little one is mobile.
Etc...
[1] Next time some political budget thing is announced on the news, pay careful attention to how they're describing the cost. Are they talking about the total dollars "over ten years" or the yearly cost per capita? Once you learn to notice this, you can mentally translate the former to "I want to make this cheap thing sound expensive." and the latter to "I want to make this expensive thing sound cheap."
But $2 per week per household, if we assume 2 adults and 2 kids, makes about $27.30 per capita per annum, which is about $9 billion dollars per year for the whole of the US - thats a lot of money being spent drying clothes.
This. Some people in the comments below mention how it saves them money and energy. $27 is not even my coffee budget for a month.
The only thing I agree with is we need more of the "integrated" washer-driers, or an automatic way to transfer clothes from one to the other. I would pay good money to save myself the effort of bending and moving wet (heavy) cold clothes, and instead have the convenience of having everything ready when I wake up.
FWIW - When I've used washer-drier combos I haven't enjoy the convenience of discovering my clothes are all damp. They just don't dry well, so the do-it-all-while-away convenience is only true maybe 50% of the time. The other 50% of time it backfires badly and you have to redo the wash.
Damp? Then it's a drying problem. I'll push on one button and check again 1h later. And I'll figure a way to double the drying time so that it doesn't happen again. So what if it's not as time-efficient as a separate drier? I don't care how long it takes during my sleep!
The absolute worst case of 1 button push is still worth the convenience of not having to move damp clothes.
