Friday, August 21, 2009

Drying & Stuff



It's official! I am saving electricity!! After seeing our atrocious electric bill for last month (blasted, but wonderful A/C!) I decided to do something drastic. Yes, I turned off our A/C at least some of the time, but I also don't know why I haven't done this before - I bought a clothes drying rack. Now I can dry my laundry in the sun! WOOOO! And it's completely free, free, free, that amazing sun is.

Of course this does mean that I have to rearrange how and when I do my laundry and I'll probably have to buy one or two more racks, but what an awesome investement, don't you think??? One obstacle to clothes drying: I don't like the smell of sun-dried clothes. Call me crazy, but I think it smells weird. And your clothing comes out stiff. However, I heard of this trick. Sun dry your clothes and then toss them into the dryer for 5 minutes (with a dryer sheet if you so desire) and PRESTO! Soft laundry without the hours of electricity burning away. Genius!


Here is a picture of some of my garden bounty. See those tomatoes back there? I grew those!!! (Ignore the avacados. I have no idea how those got onto my counter... but they sure made an amazing guacamole!)

7 comments:

Egenmay said...

For those 5 minutes you have them in your dryer, if your dryer has a tumble option that works good too and uses even less electricity!

clair said...

The bloody butcher you gave us has yummiest tomatos on it! Thank you for sharing with us.

I love your drying rack idea. I would do something like this if I wasn't so darn lazy.

janae said...

The other thing that I would recommend is using liquid fabric softener in the washer. Your clothes smell fabulous, and they don't get stiff after a couple times air drying. (I didn't have a dryer for my senior year in Bolivia or on my mission, so I've had practice not using dryers. :)

janae said...

ps. more than half the work your a/c does is in dehumidifying the air, so it often saves more money if you leave the a/c on and just permanently turn it up two or three degrees than it does if you turn it off on colder days. Just learned that this summer. :)

pps. something else we've done - it costs appx. 1 cent an hour to keep your computer in sleep mode. So if you have two computers and you actually shut them down all the way for twelve hours every night, you'll save seven dollars a month. Cell phone chargers are similar - unplug them when you aren't using them and you can save another few bucks a month.

ppps. are you sick of ps's yet?? :)

Sarah Rachelle said...

Hey, thanks for all those extra tips.
What great ideas!

Mary Q Contrarie said...

I stopped using my dryer about two years ago. I now use a couple clothes drying racks for all of my laundry.

I think it is really important in these times that we do things to save money and resources.

Mairi McCloud said...

Aren't drying racks wonderful!?! This is a great blog, by-the-way!

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