Have you ever thought about how much it costs to run your dryer before? These are the things that run through my mind while I do my chores. I set off to do some research on how much it really costs to use the dryer. When people start looking to cut costs and save money they look at small things like laundry detergent to solve their problems. The thing is saving a few cents on laundry detergent won’t get you far in cutting your costs.
A dryer uses roughly 12% of your household energy. The average dryer uses 3.3-kilowatt hours and only about 45 minutes per load. If you look at your electric bill you can see your charge per kilowatt for us we spend about 12 cents per kilowatt. So that would be 36 cents a load.
The average family of does 8 loads of laundry a week. So 36 times 8 gives you $2.88 cents a week. For a total of $187 to run the dryer in a year. even if you use the dryer here and there you can easily save more than $150 a year.
We, on the other hand, have a family of 6 with two babies in cloth diapers and run 12 loads of laundry a week on average. That is $4.32 cents saved a week or $276 a year average! Talk about adding it all up.
We do not own a dryer so I have not personally seen this on our power bill but, as an idea of how much is saves us we have an $80 electric bill in summer from making simple cuts.
Many people are afraid to give a laundry line a try. After all, it seems like so much work. The truth is it really is not much more work then putting into the dryer and you can get the kids to help. We use laundry time as a FUN MATH lesson by counting adding, subtracting and even multiplying clothes pins. We even use it as one-on-one time by bringing only one child to the line with us while the other children play in the shaded screen room on hot summer days.
If you can not have a line in your yard why not give a folding drying rack a try? We love folding racks to set up in the winter or rainy days to dry the laundry then fold out of the way when we are done. 
Using a clothesline saves you money in other ways too.
With a clothesline, laundry lasts longer. Ever wonder what the lint in the lint trap is? It’s your laundry fibers wearing down. Elastics stretch and your socks start to fall down. Holes pop up on your favorite t-shirt, and don’t get me started on what happened the time my husband helped with the laundry and shrunk my sweater beyond repair. Yep, our clothes last lot longer now. Meaning we spend less on new clothes and can save a lot of money on laundry.
Spend less on stain removal. Want to know the secret to whiter whites? Hang them in the sun to get out stains. By not using heat to dry our laundry we are not setting stains in where we can’t get them out.
Ditch the dryer sheets. When you ditch the dryer you get to ditch the dryer sheets and still have that fresh linen smell. Use white vinegar as fabric softener for even more savings. Use the money you save to build your clothes pin collection.
Leave a Reply