Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Using a clothesline

I found a new blog to enjoy smallnotebook.org. It was like fate because the first day I read her blog it was about electrical use. It really got me thinking and I started to add up our usage for certain products. It’s amazing how things add up.

Visit her post HERE to see the equation. For example using small notebooks equation for our dryer I came up with this:

Our new but very wasteful dryer uses 24 amps
24 X 240 = 5760
/1000=5.76
x .75 = 4.32
x .08 = .345

We have very cheap electrical rates, one of the good things about living in this area. There’s aren’t many advantages so I’ll take what I can get, but even with our cheap rate it still cost us 34 cents each time we run our dryer. That’s $2.07 a week and $107.64 a year!

I figured if we cut out half our loads we’ll save around $54 for the year. It’s not astronomical but it helps.

In order to cut down some of these cost we decided to begin using a clothesline. Here are some of the benefits we’ve experienced (or will) since our experiment began.

  • Saving money on electrical cost (of course)
  • We’re using our central air less b/c our dryer isn’t raising our temp
  • Spending time together while hanging clothes
  • Reduces greenhouse gas emissions
  • No lint on line dried clothes
  • No more static cling
  • Our clothes won’t shrink
The clothesline rope cost us $3.50. An investment I can live with.

Running these numbers really motivated me to cut our cost in other places around our house. Check back next week to see how we decided to save money on other items.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome! I'm glad it was helpful. I'm right there with you about the clothesline -- I love how it doesn't heat up my apartment to dry my clothes.

Megan said...

it was very helpful, thanks. And keep checking back I have a few more smallnotebook inspired ideas. :)

Audra Krell said...

$54 goes a long way, for a lot of things - I think your savings is great!

Unknown said...

Good for you! I've been considering the drastic idea of not having a dryer all together, but... I'm afraid my procrastination washing and drying would cause some problems in that department. So, for now, we have it as a backup. I have been line drying everything for quite a few months now, and feel very rewarded by doing so. If you have a minute, check out some line drying tips I have on my site!

(Just search for the keyword: "clothesline" for a helpful article.)