If you look for graphic images of clotheslines, you inevitably get a page of crap like the image to the left. Clothes lines are stereotyped as old-fashioned, or hicksville, or as the case of the one at the left, both. With a side-order of sexism.
And yet, indoor dryers are such energy hogs that outdoor clothes lines have received legally protected status in nineteen states. These are the so-called “right to dry” states. In those states, a homeowners’ association cannot ban the use of clotheslines. And this pro-outdoor-drying advocacy group gives links to the enabling legislation in all of them. (Of course there’s an advocacy group for that.)
But don’t call it a clothesline, if you live in Virginia. Here, legally speaking, I hang my underwear on a solar collection device, per statute. Same category as photo-voltaic solar panels, solar water heaters, and such.
Edit 5/14/2023: This section of Virginia statute was repealed in October 2021 (dead reference, ). BUT …
Edit 11/7/2023: But this site says that they didn’t repeal-repeal those sections, they just moved them. They repealed them where they sat and re-wrote them as a new section elsewhere.
That site appears to be correct. It appears that right-to-dry remains part of Virginia statute, but is found here and here in Virginia Code now. (Those two sections have identical wording, they are just inserted into two different Virginia laws (Property Owners Association act (§ 55.1-1820.1) and again in the Virginia Condominium Act (§ 55.1-1951.1).
The law does not guarantee an unfettered right to clothes lines. It does appear to provide some protection to use of clothes lines, in some circumstances. All of that, assuming you buy into clothes lines qualifying as “solar collection devices” as defined under Virginia statute. Which I do. FWIW.
Edit 3/13/2024: But do clotheslines qualify as “solar collection devices”, legally? I note that a proposed 2010 amendment to the original enabling legislation in Virginia would have added a separate category of “natural drying device” (per this Virginia legislature bill-tracking reference), as distinct from “solar collection device”. A “clothesline” is mentioned as a specific example of a “natural drying device”. If that had passed and been made law, that would have made the protection of clotheslines unambiguous. But it didn’t. That passed the Virginia Senate by an overwhelming majority, but died in the Virginia House.
As it stands, you either have to believe that clotheslines fall under the general provision of “solar collection device”, or that because the House committee considered it and left it as failed legislation for that year (reference), that clotheslines are not covered. But you’d have to know whether or not the relevant House committee actively rejected covering clotheslines, or whether they considered separate coverage redundant, because they considered clotheslines to be “solar collection devices”.
As to whether or not clotheslines really are protected under Virginia statute, I guess it’ll probably take a lawsuit to decide it. I have not stumbled across one. This discussion, from Maryland, appears to consider the failure to pass that bill a rejection of clothesline protections in Virginia. But that one offhand snippet is all the legal discussion I managed to find. So, as of this writing, I’m not sure whether or not Virginia is a right-to-dry state, as is frequently claimed by clothesline advocates.
Original post follows:
So, ignore the stereotypes. Clothes lines are up there with cutting-edge solar, from an energy-savings and legal standpoint.
I actually have a point to this. Sometimes I hang my clothes indoors. And sometimes I get lazy and just chuck them in the dryer. Which, in winter, I vent to the indoor space. And so get both the heat and humidity that the drying provides.
And, because I’ve been touting the benefits of indoor humidity, I needed to know: How much humidity does a load of laundry generate? Which boils down to: How much water is left in the laundry at the end of the spin cycle. Pun intended.
Oddly, I could not find a simple reference for that, for the home laundry. So I did my own measurement, weighing a pair of jeans pre- and post-wash. This is in a high-quality (Speed Queen) old-fashioned top-loading washer.
I found that the jeans retained water equal to about two-thirds their dry weight. Which is surprisingly close to a middle-of-the-road spin cycle for commercial laundry equipment, as show below:
Source: bandctech.com
A quick calculation shows that my old-fashioned washer spins the laundry at about 100 Gs. So my estimate for jeans is just above their 50/50 flat-goods line (whatever that means.) Based on this chart, stepping up to modern front-loader (with typical spin force of 300 Gs) would only reduce the water load by about one-quarter. That’s non-negligible, but I thought the effect of the higher G-forces of more modern front-loaders was higher than that.
The upshot is that a typical 15-pound load of dry laundry would retain about 10 pounds of water after the spin cycle, or about 5 quarts. Again, that’s based on my old-style top loader.
That squares nicely with drying time of about an hour, in the dryer. Dryers typically take about 3500 watts, and evaporating five quarts of water would take about 3 kilowatt-hours of electricity. And so, per the aside above, switching to more modern equipment with greater water extraction would save about 0.75 KWH/dryer load, or about 11 cents’ worth of electricity at $0.15/KWH.
The context is that, with today’s weather, I’m on track for using about four gallons a day to keep the humidity up in my house. The current outdoor conditions (46F, 56% relative humidity) would yield about 25% indoor relative humidity at room temperature if no moisture were added. The fact that it’s windy adds to the burden through more rapid air exchange between the interior of my house and the out-of-doors. The importance of air exchange was explained in Post #895.
The upshot is that laundry alone won’t keep my house humidified, but it certainly helps.
