Go Green in Your Home

Everyone has to do laundry. Everyone can save money while doing their laundry. This go green tip will teach you how to save money while drying your clothes. The average family will spend $156/year drying clothes in their homes, around $390 if you go to a laundry mat! Continue reading this go green article to learn how can you save this money and help save the environment by using less electricity or use less gas!

How Much Does it Cost to Dry a Load of Clothes

Drying clothes cost around $0.50/load of laundry done in an electric dryer or around $0.45/load of laundry to dry in a gas clothes dryer. The gas dryer costs around $0.04/load for electricity and $0.41/load for the gas. The average family will do around 6 loads of laundry a week, which is 312 loads of laundry a year! So if you are using an electric clothes dryer you will spend around $156/year just by drying your clothes. If you are using a gas clothes dryer, you will spend around $140.40/year to dry your clothes!

How Can I Dry Clothes Without Using a Clothes Dryer

Yes, you can dry your laundry without having a clothes dryer, or even if you have a clothes dryer you can use these methods to save money. Simple, you can hang your clothes on a clothesline to dry. You can hang your clothes on a clothes drying rack, indoor clothesline, outdoor clothesline, etc. Just hang your clothes somewhere dry, and your clothes will dry. Hanging clothes to dry will save you around $156/year. Plus, if you don’t already have a clothes dryer, you will save more money by not buying a clothes dryer!

If you want to hang your clothes indoors, you can simply get a clothesline and run it across your basement. I’d recommend using a clothes drying rack and a clothesline. I like clothes drying racks slightly more because they are not in the way. You can place clothes drying racks off to the side somewhere and you don’t have to duck every time you walk around in your basement! You will still want to use a clothes line for some of your larger loads or even larger laundry, like sheets, blankets, etc.

Hanging your clothes on an outdoors clothes line will usually dry your clothes faster as the heat from the sun will dry them. Some people worry about clothes fading as they are in the sun. I really haven’t had a problem with that, but I don’t leave my clothes out all day. I usually only set them out to get them partially dry, then bring them indoors to finish drying.

Another way to dry your clothes even faster is to use a clothes spinner or a clothes wringer first before hanging them to dry or if you are still wanting to use an electric clothes dryer, spinning or wringing your clothes out first will save you money, but not as mush as just hang drying your clothes.

A clothes spin dryer is kind of like the last cycle on your washer, it spins clothes really fast using centrifugal force to force the water out of the clothes. A clothes spinner will get clothes dryer than the spin cycle on your washer. The clothes wringer squeezes the water out of the clothes.

I think the clothes wringer is more efficient than the clothes spinner. The clothes spinner is a little faster, and also uses less effort from you. A clothes wringer still requires you to feed each article of clothing into the wringer, even if you get an electric clothes wringer, you will still have to feed the clothes into the clothes wringer, but you won’t have to hand crank the clothes through the wringer. I recommend thinking of it like this, if you get a hand crank clothes wringer, you get to do laundry, save money, and get a slight exercise all at the same time!

You may also wat to read my go green tip: Save Money Doing Laundry Washing Clothes