Levi's cloths eco cloths dryer competiion
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Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
My wife lived in North Carolina for two years and lived at a managed apartment complex (actually here http://www.stonesthrowapartments.com/photos.asp). It was forbidden to dry clothes outside and so she had to hire a dryer. Most times she just hung her clothes on a clothes horse in the spare bedroom and they dried well enough. The summers in NC are really hot and ideal for drying clothes. Where is the economic sense in using an electrical dryer! The average home clothes dryer has a carbon footprint of approximately 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of CO2 per load of laundry dried (or so it says here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer).
There would seem to be some sort of social stigma attached to drying clothes outside (not in UK and Europe). Can anyone explains that? Clothes dried in the sun smell wonderful.
Regards,
Bob -
I don't have an electric dryer but to tell the truth, I have never even heard of anyone having one here. We have an attic (with two proper windows actually ready to build in as one or two rooms - we keep those windows ajar open all the time there's no need for heating) and hang the clothes there for drying.
On the other hand, I also do not see anything wrong drying clothes in the garden if you have one. -
Brilliant picture, imho!
I wonder how they manage to hang up the ones in the middle... they must have some kind of pulley-system...
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I took that picture in Wuhan, China. They don't have any problems drying the cloths outside.
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@unknownuser said:
whow bmike... such an amazing and original idea!!
hard to beat the free energy the sun throws down on us every day.
i always get a chuckle out of these 'eco' and 'green' design contests... always a technological fix, always more to buy, always more required to mine out of the ground, ship around the world, have things built by cheap labor, then shipped thousands of miles to the end consumer only to be plugged in and draw more energy.
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@watkins said:
It was forbidden to dry clothes outside and so she had to hire a dryer.
Vermont passed a 'right to dry' law last year. Our townhouse complex wouldn't allow it either - on the front porch or in the backyard...
But now we have a nice backyard... just need to rig up the line after I finish the sandbox for the little one...
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@watkins said:
There would seem to be some sort of social stigma attached to drying clothes outside
??
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That is the more ecologic and save some electricity!
Wind is your friend when it's not too strong
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@thomthom said:
@watkins said:
There would seem to be some sort of social stigma attached to drying clothes outside
??
Too poor to own a dryer can = lower class. Got some silly hangups here in the US; poor(er) people hang their clothes out to dry because they can't afford to machine dry them, so as soon as people can afford a dryer they quit hanging the clothes out in order to disassociate themselves from the poorer class. This isn't a deliberate reaction, it's just one of those things; we're rich enough to own a dryer, so use it! We'll just see if the yuppies can get overpower that hangup by going "green" while saving money and some environmental costs by line drying their laundry.
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I find being able to, having the space to, hang your clothes outside as a luxury. Guess space is something the US has a lot of.
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Hi folks.
Don't forget that a dryer's tumbling action is quite damaging for clothes. After you have emptied the filter tray a few times, are you not wondering where all that stuff is coming from ?
Just ideas.
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It would seem to me in big urban areas such as China up there. . .(see above) the clothes come back dirtier than when you hung them out. Beijing is so polluted you can actually cut out a block of air by the square foot. SO you wash more often. Use more soap. . .That's good for the greenscape.
As far as dryers dissolving clothes. . .we tend to wear them out faster in our use or simply grow tired of them and swap them out long before they become a big ball of lint. But think of that. All that lint. . ! INSULATION! that's green.
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@unknownuser said:
...we tend to wear them out faster in our use or simply grow tired of them and swap them out long before they become a big ball of lint...
Well, I spent a semester in a small Penn state university in 1990. I bought a couple of T-shirts there and I still have them (although true that I only wear them as "playground" clothes nowadays already)
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50 ft of clothesline: $6-$7. 1 package of 50 wooden Clothespins $2-$3. Watching some guy win $4000 by designing a $500-$1,000 contraption with 7,000 moving part that are all prone to wear and tear and require maintenance, that accomplishes the same task but with more effort... PRICELESS!
I love these type of competitions!
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Sure, it is pretty silly, but it would be nice to see what people come up with for indoors solutions for a small apartment in damp humid cold climates without access to hanging outside. I'm in a dry climate so we have it pretty lucky, to be honest I don't know how long it would take cloths to dry in a really humid climate. A hanging rack works well, but uses up space. I think a drying closet that doubles as your normal closet would be great. Of course you want air passing through it vs. leaving it closed.
Also something to consider is cutting down machine washing energy use by removing or minimizing the spin cycle. I see a pole with cloths hanging off off it that kids spin to play in the water outside. Or maybe rig a drum up to a stationary bike. Kind of silly ideas, but still nice to get people thinking about it.
Sure, nothing will be as simple as a cloths line and a pins, and maybe nothing will work any better, but not everyone is using those.
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I was not making fun of the post or anything. It is just that I've often found these kind of contests... quirky(?)... the winning entries are always for something impractical/wacky that nobody in their right mind would ever buy or use. When I was a kid my grandfather had an old washing machine that had no spin cycle... you wrung out your wash by cranking it though two slip rollers at the top... worked pretty well and gave you big biceps... perhaps a more ergonomic version of that with better gearing and polymer rollers would work... still such stuff requires effort and time... both in short supply in this world of instant gratification. Anyone living in Lancaster county PA should give their Amish neighbors a visit and see some of the amazingly clever and GREEN solutions they have to similar issues... still most of those require physical work and probably would not fit in a small apartment well.
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I remember the first washing machine my dear old mum ever had. It was a Servis with a mangle, and I think it was this model
The clothes were so hot that she had to use wooden tongs to feed the clothes into the mangle. The clothes were then rinsed in cold water by hand and then fed back through the mangle. She thought it was wonderful. Before that it was a large zinc bath, a scrubbing board and a large mangle that one turned by hand.
Bob
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Well, something similar here. I remember my parents buying our forst washing machine which was practically just a rinser something like this:
And she then had another machine (is there a word like "centrifugal"?) to get rid of the water:
But before this, hand washing. Especially where we first lived (until I was 2) where there was not even water in the house but had to go to the corner where there was a public pump like this:
Well, poor mum washed my nappies (of course no disposable paper one back then) with some wooden pieces adjusting them in hot, boiling water in the stove...
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Footage of a Victorian Public Laundry
How times have changed.
Regards,
Bob -
Well for green machine washers: at a farm where I used to live, we had a gas powered wringer machine--but we took the gas motor off, added a starter engine and ran it all on solar collectors. The drying was also solar / wind, on a clothes line.
McGyver, I suspect some of the problem with the competitions is not the green element, but the fact that people are trying to invent such things all the time and if it worked, it would soon be on the market. Probably there are examples of some such competitions that actually created a result by proposing new threads of thought--but probably best suited for "appropriate technology" solutions for rural or undeveloped areas.
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