Hang your clothes to dry them, even indoors

Drying clothes in a dryer takes a lot of energy. You may have taken some steps to decrease your home energy usage, but if you still dry all of your clothes in a clothes dryer, you have the opportunity to save some serious energy.

Before I get too far into it, yes, I realize that there are some clothes items, due to their material and the whole wrinkle issue that are high maintenance items that beg to be dried at least partially in a dryer. If you have those types of issues, read on and at least minimize dryer time.

When it is hot or even warm out, hanging your clothes on an outdoor clothes line is a great way to save energy drying your clothes, while giving them a nice outdoor freshness. The added benefit of saving energy is compounded a bit by the fact that you are avoiding adding heat to your home in your laundry area that emanates from your dryer during a dry cycle. This added heat increases the energy usage in cooling your home if you use air conditioning or makes your warm house warmer.

In much of the Northern Hemisphere, it is getting pretty cold outside these days. I hang my clothes outside until about this time of year. They will dry even on the coldest days if there is a good wind, or you get them out early in the morning. They even have a more crisp fresh smell, too.

But, and here's the really great energy saving tip, as the outdoor drying season comes to a close, hang your clothes inside.

Yes, inside. And I don't mean one of those collapsable wooden racks, though I do use one to supplement my clotheslines. And yes I am talking indoor clotheslines. We have two indoor clotheslines in our house.

The first is right in the laundry area of our unfinished basement. I have hung a couple of crossbars from the floor joists and strung clothesline between them. This provides some great drying space right near the washer. It has enough capacity for a fair amount of laundry and is more or less out of the way.

The second indoor clothesline is in our guest room. We rarely have guests and this clothesline has the capacity for another decent load of laundry. The wooden rack takes any small strays that these two can't handle. So, how is this clothesline set up? Well, in our case, we live in a log home and I put a row of decorative hand wrought nails on two opposing beams on the ceiling and have lengths of clothesline with loops at the ends that I hang on the nails between the beams. When we have guests, it is a 10 second job to lift the lines off of the nails.

So, you don't have a log home? No problem. Just use your window frames. If you put a row of nails down through the tops of your window, or even door, frames (actually sort of behind your frames and into the stud wall framing surrounding your windows) you can string clothesline between opposing windows or even diagonally across the corner of a room.

The energy saving benefits of hanging your clothes indoors at this time of year are increased by the drying process. All of that water is evaporating into your house, humidifying your air. This time of year is tends to be very dry indoors due to the effects of running your furnace, heaters, woodstove, or whatever you do to keep your house warm. Many people use humidifiers to increase the moisture in their indoor air. These invariably use energy, adding more cost to what you already spend on winter heating. If you must use your dryer for some clothes and you have an electric dryer, you can install an exhaust diverter to reclaim the moisture. DO NOT use one of these if you have a propane or natural gas dryer as your exhaust contains combustion gases.

With the size of the average house what it is, surely you can find a location to put at least one set of clotheslines up to help save you money and save the planet.