Laundry Liberation: Fighting for the Right to Hang Your Clothes Out to Dry

via AlterNet:



Laundry Liberation: Fighting for the Right to Hang Your Clothes Out to Dry

By Luanne Bradley, EcoSalon. Posted September 16, 2009.

Using a clothes line instead of a dryer saves tons of carbon, yet some communities have banned the practice.




Fighting for a hybrid in every garage is cake compared to the battle to allow an outdoor clothesline in every yard. Still, advocacy groups like Project Laundry List are urging a return to the days before newfangled cleaning machines drained our electric bills and resources – a time when nobody flinched at the site of a big bra or jockey shorts flapping in the wind.

Why do these soldiers refuse to fold?

The advocacy group New American Dream calculates that if every American home switched to cold water for four out of five loads, together we can save $6.7 billion per year and keep nearly 50 million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere – the equivalent of removing 10 million cars from the road.

If only 40% of those households also line dried their clothes, the annual carbon savings would more than double.

Founded by Alexander Lee of Condord, NH, Project Laundry List has established a website that tracks states with ordinances banning outdoor clotheslines, such as Oregon. You can watch a compelling CBS video on the site of a feature Bill Geist did about a Bend woman engaging in civil disobedience in her subdivision by fighting for her right to conserve energy.

Nationwide, some 300,000 communities with home owner associations restrict outdoor laundry hanging, according to the Community Associations Institute. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/142681/laundry_liberation%3A_fighting_for_the_right_to_hang_your_clothes_out_to_dry

...in a piece I called http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/12/233435/372">Advanced Technology Could Save 3% of American Greenhouse Gas Emissions: New York Times.

Clothes lines are effective solar power that actually can work on scale at low cost. This makes it superior to all the really, really, really, really, really, really cool forms of solar energy that people are always prattling on about.

Dryers ruin your clothes...

Not the same thing as a clothes line, but it does save energy:

...and find that there is less wear and tear than if the dryer is used.

One note on this: I am very tall and the dryer seems to make things shorter and wider. Hanging does not seem to have the same result.

The only things that hit the dryer are sheets and towel items. I have nowhere to hang them in the house and the rules where I live prohibit outside drying with the use of any clothes lines.

And already hang clothes whenever possible. To expand capability to what the outdoor lines provide I added 20 feet of pipe suspended from hangers along the inside of our back porch. Our children are gone, so we now use that almost exclusively. We have used the dryer perhaps once in the last 2 years.

Stop being such a dip.

Stop buying into Commercial Propaganda that tries to sell you something by promoting the idea that "stiff" clothing off the line is somehow meaningful. As soon as you start wearing them the "stiffness" disappears.

This is about absorbency and smell more than softness -- but I suspect it might also help with the fluffiness.

http://lifehacker.com/5362234/use-vinegar-and-baking-soda-to-recharge-your-towels

If you're in the habit of using the amount of detergent recommended on the bottle, which is almost always way more than you need, and then hitting towels with fabric softener or dryer sheets you're setting yourself up for towels that lose their absorbency and can even begin to stink.

That's right, most of the time stinky towels aren't a result of failing to wash your towels enough but using too much detergent and fabric softener. The short of it is this: more isn't better and over time soap residue can accumulate within the fibers of the towels ensuring that not only do they fail to absorb as much water as they can but they also don't dry as effectively as they should. When your towels seem to get a funky smell immediately upon getting wet again, failure to dry completely thanks to soap residue is usually the culprit.

What can you do? Saving your towels is as simple as running them through two hot loads. Skip the detergent on both loads, run them through once with hot water and a cup of vinegar and then again with hot water and a half cup of baking soda. Your goal, whether washing brand new towels or old towels, is to strip the softener and detergent reside from the fibers of the towel and get them as absorbent as possible.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/739509/tips_for_hanging_laundry_on_a_clothesline.html

Some folks find that their laundry is uncomfortably stiff after being hung to dry. Hang your laundry on a windy day and this won't be such a problem. The wind is actually more important than the amount of sunlight, since it is the action of the wind that fluffs the fabric. Hanging laundry on a hot, sunny, windless day will only scorch the fabric and stiffen it. You don't need bright sunlight to get your laundry dry, but the sun does have natural disinfectant properties and will bleach your whites their brightest.

To hang sheets, towels, cloth diapers, and linens, pin them on the line so they form a "bag." Fold these items across the middle, so the short ends meet and the fold is at the bottom. Use clothespins to fasten the corners to the line. Then fasten one side of the sheet or towel to the clothesline with several pins, leaving the other side free. The wind will get between the layers of fabric, and make it billow out into a bag shape. It is the action of the wind and the fabric rubbing together that produces soft, fluffy sheets and towels dried on a clothesline.

or I've heard that adding vinegar to the rinse cycle can help take out the stiffness. Actually, I've just gotten used to it, so it's really not a big deal...in fact I sort of like it since the initial stiffness reminds me I'm saving energy and helping the planet in a small way.

In Florida you have a right to have a clothesline, and even Pretentious Palms Gated Community Homeowners Association can't tell you that you can't. You can't agree to give up this right through covenants. Not only that, but you have a right to put it in the place where it works best.

And as for the water temp, it comes out of the pipes/ground warm here.

Is a clothes dryer considered a necessary appliance. If you go shopping for a clothes dryer in Europe, you are unlikely to see one in a showroom, and will most likely have to special order it.

as a sort of symbol of urban blight, just the thing they were trying to get away from.

My mother and father came from working class roots and they both stuck to certain practices that served their purpose and saved money. The clothesline was, at least in mother's eyes, a symbol of working class pride. She continued to use it long after these young, upwardly-mobile, professionals began to move into the neighborhood. There were a few instances where these people not-so-discreetly hinted that they disapproved of the practice of hanging out clothes to dry. My parents ignored them. There were no covenants in the neighborhood, my parents hated such things. We had also moved into our house long before any of these class-obsessed residents had.

Simple fact: probably the biggest energy hog in any household is the drier. It requires large amounts to energy to do to things, provide mechanical motion to move the clothes around and provide thermal energy to dry off the clothing. Combining those two energy need results in a great deal of energy usage and a great deal of released carbon.

I'm rooting for the clothes line users!!