I know those kind of headlines are tricks. They’re designed to lure you in and then surprise you with some lame change that usually doesn’t work. But I swear this one does.
So what is it?
It’s to stop using your dryer during the months when there’s no snow on the ground and start using a drying rack instead. Whew. That was tough.
Gigantic Changes Are Usually Hard
Yep. It’s a lot easier to just do little changes, step by step, until you’ve realized that a big change has come about right before your very eyes without you even realizing it.
But in a way, that’s what using a drying rack is – in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very gigantic or revolutionary idea, but it’s one that will actually have a pretty gigantic effect on your electricity usage during the year.
This One Isn’t, and It’s the Perfect Season for It
I live in Europe, and so we have a lot more temperate seasons and less humidity. So I understand that you can’t dry your clothes every day. But if you compared our energy bills at the end of the year, I guarantee you there’d be an absolutely gigantic difference between what I’m spending and what you’re spending, and a big chunk of that would be the dryer.
Cranking up that level of heat and motion – and doing it on a frequent basis, if you wash a lot, is a big suck on your electricity.
And conversely, using a drying rack requires just a bit of physical exertion on your part. In a flash, you’ve eliminated one of the biggest energy consumers in your entire home, and you’ve done nothing more than spend 15-20 minutes hanging up some clothes.
Look, you can even hang up clothes in the winter. Just get an indoor drying rack. Make sure your washer does a spin cycle so that they’re not dripping wet when you take them out of the washing machine, and then hang them up.
The worst that happens? You lose the ability to wear your laundered clothes immediately. And you gain a huge savings in energy.
How To Make it Stick (One on, One off)
The problem with plans like this is that switching away from using your dryer isn’t something that you can probably do immediately. Like I was saying above, any so-called “gigantic” change (even if it’s just a simple one) is hard to implement if you go all-in, right away.
So don’t. Do what people trying to slowly switch to vegetarianism are doing. Going “vegetarian on weekdays”. Start drying your laundry with a rack or a clothesline on Monday-Friday, or just on weekends. Then, once you’ve got in that habit, increase it a little more.
It’s an easy strategy – and it works.
