Does an airer really save money when drying clothes?

I think the idea is to first hang the washing on a line outside and then bring it in when damp rather than wet.

The last advice I saw was using a dehumidifier in the room to speed the drying of clothes.

A heat pump drier should be the cheapest. My drier is old and I looked at replacements before energy prices rocketed and wondered if I'd live long enough to recover the high cost of the drier. I should do now!

Is this "advice" from mumsnet, or clueless journalists?

also will make the house more damp than a tumble dryer which will either be vented outside, or condensed down a drain.

hang wet clothes on the line today and they'll come in frozen, not damp.

We had a heated airer and it was s*it.

Dehumidifier usually pulls 1L/24h of water out of the air. Which not only dries clothes but makes the heating go further.

I use a pulley airer AND and an elecric dehumidifier

with all that jagging you do I doubt it.....

That's what we've done for years, it's effective at drying and i'm sure less costly that a dryer. There are heat pump dryers now though that I hear are very efficient.

Unicorn breath?

What happened to spin dryers?

Yes, today maybe but when the wind generators start turning again and its a few degrees warmer then 4 hours outside does most of ten heavy lifting.

Incorporated in the washing m/c. I remember my mother's twin tub.

Er, that's what you'd do with a tumble drier isn't it?

Huh? This gets back to my original question, it takes just as much energy with the dehumidifier as with any other way of removing the water doesn't it?

Though I guess if you actually condense the vapour back into water you get the energy back don't you.

Often not. Washing tends to be done in the evening or overnight here. In the morning I go to work. If I hung it out before going, there'd be a good chance of it raining before I got back (Manchester), so it goes stright into the tumble dryer - unless the weather is good enough that there's almost definitely going to be no rain and then it's probably good enough weather to dry it on the line anyway.

My wife can't take the washing in if it rains, as she's disabled and only 4'11", so she can't reach the line (I can't put it lower, as items would sweep the ground until the prop was put in place ... and it would garotte me on the way to the shed, in the dark!) and she can't carry a basket full of washing anyway.

Straight from the washing machine to the tumble drier.

Remove clothes from tumble drier when dry and place into drawers.

If the sun shines on the clothes while frozen, there is still sublimation. Your shirt may come in stiff-as-a-board, but it is dried to dampness, and only needs a few hours on a rack to finish. Assuming the inside of the premises has decently low humidity (40% right now, 25% end-Jan.) . You can't be in a rush for that shirt.

When we first got an electric dryer, we hardly used it back home. I don't think the electricity was particularly cheap, which provided the proper incentive.

To put it bluntly, you do what you have to do.

For example, I would not want to have to install washing lines in the winter. It's better to do the maintenance work, such as pouring and setting a new post (termination of line, opposite house), while it is pleasant outside. You can change a line any time (vinyl covered, braided steel line with clips and crank for tensioning), but you'll likely come in the house a couple times for a warm up, before you're finished. You have to pull the line taut, before fitting the clips. The crank is only for small corrections, and the crank spindle doesn't hold much of the slack.

For our install, the steps and landing at the back of the house, leave you about six feet above the ground, you put the line up and screw a holder for a pulley, another four feet above the landing, and that ten feet gives you enough clearance to put out bedding. It might take a dozen pegs to hold up a wrung-out bedding. And then you might have to arrange the items, so the smaller items go out first, and the bigger items go where there is clearance to the ground. I wouldn't particularly want to do bedding, in the dead of winter. Shirts are OK.

# Example of an elaborate one. Pulley bearing needs to be maintained! # Check greasing once a year. If you don't, pulley will lean to the # side and scrape against the pulley frame, annoying the operator. # The pulley wheel will start to cut into the metal of the pulley frame. # Basically, the beginnings of bearing failure. The bearing design # is usually awful.

Back when the city had an incinerator, it was fallout from the incinerator that fouled the wash (falling ash). And was bad enough on one occasion, to cause a re-wash of the load. The incinerator was removed a long time ago. Just the birds remain.

The vinyl-covered braided-steel lines, you can usually tell when they're getting "ripe" and need to be changed out. Say eight-ten years or so. You can see visible rust underneath the vinyl. Sometimes the line sag, helps predict failure. You don't want a line to snap, with a full load of wash - you won't hear the end of it :-)

You have little to worry about when the line is new.

It's a hell of a way to "earn a pound"! But if lekky is in short supply, you can do it.

Paul

Hang the clothes up & they dry themselves. If you're really perpetually so disorganised that you need them dry quickly use a fan.

You want a pulley-line then.

And it does help to have reliable weather forecasting. (The Norwegian weather forecast does that for me.)

Many is the time, as a kid, I had to pull in a wash when rain started. Who ever is hanging around the house, has to pitch in. With two clothes lines, one person takes each line. You can even have *two* people working on one clothes line, to double the removal rate (if washing is only on the one line). That is, if you have enough clothes baskets to keep everyone happy (when each person removes an item from the line, they drop it into their own basket).

That's one of the advantages of a pulley-line, is stuff like removal.

In the example here, you would want a "landing", an elevated wooden structure below the near pulley, so up to two people can unload at the same time, with their clothes baskets. You grab the line and wheel it along, as you remove items and their clothes pegs.

Paul

What was wrong with a mangle? And using it properly made ironing easier, and dangling the mains wire from a light bulb fitting kept it from tangling with the articles.

Mind you using the copper boiler and carrying the hot water to the bath tub in front of the fire was a bit of a pain.