Introduction
Everyone has a dryer at home, and it consumes a lot of power. A decent dryer also costs a lot of money and is a pain to repair. If your dryer is broken, you can search for “dryer repair near me” and hire professionals to fix it for you. For now, you can do the next best thing and air dry your clothes. Let’s check out why you should air dry your clothes.
The Reasons
- Saves you money – While completely getting rid of the dryer in favor of drying isn’t recommended, let’s consider that for a moment. If you do that, you save thousands of dollars since air drying costs nothing more than the cost of a few strong nylon lines connecting high points. Dryers need to be replaced around every decade and that means you save thousands of dollars every few years.
That’s not where the savings end. You spend a lot of money on electricity. Let’s do some math. Dryers use anywhere from 1800 to 5000 watts of power with 3000 being the average. However, your bill is calculated in kilowatts per hour. Let’s figure that out with a simple calculation. If two loads of washing take two hours, you use around 6000 watts of power.
To convert that into kWh, you need to divide it by 1000. That means you use 6kWh for drying two loads. So, if you pay around the average cost of $0.13 per kWh, you spend around 6×0.13, or 0.78 kWh for drying two loads. While a single person may dry two loads every week, a family of four would need to dry 8 loads. That means they spend around $3 every week for powering the dryer. Extend that to a year and an average family spends over $150 every year for powering the dryer. All that money can be saved when you air dry your clothes.
However, that’s just scratching the surface. You also need to account for the dryer sheets, aluminum balls, or wool balls that go into the dryer along with the cost of repairs. Repairs can cost hundreds of dollars when you factor in labor for the technician. When you air dry your clothes for free, you keep a lot more money in your bank account.
- Your clothes smell fresh – When you tumble dry your clothes in the machine, it can create a nasty smell since fibers are basically lightly heated in a damp environment. To fix that, you need to use things like dryer sheets and other chemical compounds. While those chemical compounds and dryer sheet residue make your clothes smell nicer, they cost money and are also harmful to your health.
On the other hand, when you air dry your clothes, all the odor is extracted and moved away in an open environment. Since the clothes are dried by free-flowing air and the heat from the sun, the odors don’t get trapped in a stuffy environment and smell fresher. All that’s done without the use of harmful chemicals or use of any deodorizer.
- It promotes weight loss and physical activity – Clothes dryers are very convenient. You simply need to move the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, press a few buttons and wait for an hour or two. However, convenience takes away the work your ancestors used to put into drying just a century ago.
When you air-dry clothes, you spend at least 15 minutes or more moving a heavy basket full of wet clothes and hanging it on the line. During that period, you bend, use all your strength to wring out excess moisture from the clothes, spread it on the line, and attach them with clips. This needs to be repeated for each item of clothing and all that physical activity burns a lot of calories. You’ll be burning at least 100 calories during that activity and that means an extra snack portion or weight loss.
- Fabrics don’t get damaged – When clothes are tumble-dried in a clothes dryer, they are spun in a circular chamber full of hot air. That air is extremely hot, and it needs to be that way so that your clothes come out dry as quickly as possible. The clothes are also thrown around constantly in that dryer drum and tolerate a lot of abrasion and forceful impacts. All those factors go into damaging your clothes. It’s so damaging, that there is a lint filter that traps loose damaged fibers that come off your clothes during the drying process.
Fortunately, air drying is extremely gentle on your clothes and doesn’t damage them at all. While it takes several hours to dry your clothes, fabrics aren’t subjected to extreme temperatures. Your clothes are dried gently at ambient temperature and don’t get thrown around. That means you can wear your favorite pair of pants, shirts, skirts, and other items of clothing for a longer time. This also leads to indirect savings since you have to buy fewer clothes in the long run.
- It helps the environment – As mentioned above, air-drying helps you dry clothes without using power. That means you can drastically reduce your home’s carbon footprint. If your home primarily gets power from fossil fuels, then you can make a significant contribution to cutting down carbon emissions and slowing down climate change.
There’s no need to throw away your dryer. You can use it during rainy days or during emergencies when you need a dry load as quickly as possible. You also prevent nasty chemicals in dryer sheets from polluting the water when you limit the use of your clothes dryer.
Conclusion
As you can see, air-drying your clothes brings a lot of benefits. From saving you a lot of money on power and dryer repair to saving the environment. Reserve the dryer for emergencies and for certain types of garments. If your dryer is broken, you can search for “dryer repair near me” and get it fixed by a technician.
