Clothesline controversy
It was a tradition I grew up with and I never questioned it. Putting laundry out on the line on a summer’s day was what we did. It’s what everybody in our neighborhood did. Nobody thought anything about it. Nobody even looked twice.
I do it now, in my backyard in Athens and many of my neighbors do it, too. I can’t imagine anything generally less offensive than the sight of a family’s laundry swaying on a line in a summer breeze. But I’ve recently learned I must be redneck or something. There are actually communities where people are banned from doing this.
The ABC Evening News just reported that some folks trying to line-dry are running up against homeowners and condo associations that ban the practice. They’re being told that the sight of their skivvies on a clothesline is aesthetically unappealing and would lower property values.
For people trying to lower their carbon footprint or simply trying to save money, that’s a bummer, because the way you dry your laundry has an impact both ways. As reported by ABC, clothes dryers account for nearly 6 percent of residential electricity use. Add the 17 percent of people using gas dryers and the figure for dryers as a total fraction of residential energy use climbs significantly. Another way of looking at it, the average family household spends about a quarter of their total electric bill on drying clothes, or at least $100 a year. Letting the sun do more of the drying means less energy consumption and a lower utility bill.
If you live in Florida, Utah or Colorado and you want to line-dry, you’re in luck. Thanks to the advocacy efforts of groups like Project Laundry List and others, those states have passed right-to-dry laws. California, Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon and Vermont are considering similar legislation. But, in the meantime, it’s buyer/renter beware: your community covenant, your local zoning laws, and your landlord may not allow outside clothes drying, and those bans may be perfectly legal. It doesn’t mean you have to use your dryer; you just may have to get a little creative with your use of indoor drying space.
We use a collapsible wooden drying rack year ’round for skivvies, socks, and small stuff (setting it out on the deck in the sun), but during the winter and on wet days, we also hang damp clothes on hangers from the shower curtain rod and off shelving in the laundry room. On such days we also “par-dry,” that is, we throw the stuff in the dryer for a few minutes to take some of the wetness out before we hang. It speeds indoor drying time and gets a lot of the wrinkles out.
I don’t know what we save by hanging our clothes on the line, but I like doing it and am mighty glad I’m surrounded by neighbors who feel the same.
Here’s the link to the ABC news report, “Clotheslines: A Fight to Air Clean Laundry” - http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id
=5442780&page=1
Here’s the link to the Project Laundry List website - http://www.laundrylist.org/
