Name: Cal
Location: 1200 sq foot apartment, Winston Salem, NC
Profession: Physician
Green Move #1: We've been implementing "green" strategies for a while now, but our newest thing is this indoor drying rack on our ceiling. It consists of 4 wooden dowels hung on metal brackets connected to a pulley system. Our landlord says it came from Ireland...
Green Move #1 cont'd:
You can see in the pictures that it's located near the outer wall of our apartment, between two windows. This tends to be the warmest place in the apartment, and the clothes dry amazingly fast as the warm air rises. It's also facing the air conditioner vents for extra circulation.
My husband was a huge skeptic but now loves the way it makes all of his clothes feel like they've been to the cleaners. I love the way it makes our sheets feel.
We've reduced the number of times we use the dryer to 1 or 2 times a month - for terrycloth towels mainly, but we may transition to no dryer eventually. I've noticed that we only used 25 kwh per day this June compared to 35 in June 2007. I can't directly correlate but using a clothes dryer is a major energy expenditure so I suspect this was a large part of the drop.
To think I could have been doing this for years..... and a lot of other city dwellers could as well!
Green Move #2:
I've started to shower the way I do it in Haiti when I'm visiting there -- the process is mainly due to the fact that freezing cold water comes out of the shower head, but it also conserves water. I simply turn the water off while I'm lathering. Then back on when it's time to rinse.
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Air drying in the loft. This is what I do in Winter especially. It increases the humidity (here in dry MN) and its cheap.
Cheers!
view SeanG's profile
Great idea! It looks like a bicycle pulley?
view art's profile
While I love this idea, I think the energy you save is overwhelmed by the energy being used by your flatscreen TV. Not that I don't applaud efforts to go green, but I think it's important to focus on scale & priorities. The manufacture of many flatscreens uses a chemical that is 14,000x more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jul/03/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange
view saplet's profile
That drying rack is great, but nothing new. Ian Curtis used one to commit suicide. Somehow, that pops into my head whenever I see one. Anyway, they were common in G.B. and good for drying clothes without taking up a lot of floor space.
view otis's profile
Yes, my landlord says they are very common in Ireland, but I've searched a little for them in the US and couldn't find a distributor. When I lived in Paris we had a rack that hung out of my window -- which occassionally meant our clothes smelled like our neighbor's dinner. But I've never seen one like this in the US. And it does seem like a bike pulley, art, and probably could be replicated easily.
view cal's profile
Wow, I remember seeing these in a neighbor's kitchen, while growing up in Ireland in the 1970s, before people there got wealthy and got electric dryers. The rack was old, even then and I never saw them for sale in hardware stores. It seems that a British company still markets something like it (thank you again Google images):
http://www.guardianecostore.co.uk/guardian/product.aspx?productid=11099
http://www.naturalcollection.com/natural-products/Overhead-Dryer.aspx?f=affwin
Also , EcoDri sells one for ~ $100:
http://www.greenthinkers.org/blog/2007/08/ecodri_dry_your_clothes_way_up.html
http://ecodri.com/
view mikeinkansascity's profile
@arza,
you just gave me goose bumps--factory records.
view art's profile
Now this is interesting and something that a lot of people could do, but probably aren't. Yet another reason to wish I had high ceilings. Any suggestions about how to rig a drying rack like this in a small apartment with 8-foot ceilings without it creating a ton of visual clutter? Could I get away with putting it in the bathroom?
view lurker2209's profile
In Japan, few people have clothes dryers so all apartments have a veranda or balcony to hang clothes on in urban areas. Also, most traditional places have trim all around the edges of at least one room that clothing can be hooked over for drying clothes inside. Of course, some of the energy saved is undermined by the fact that people who dry inside have air conditioners with special settings for drying laundry. They run the air conditioner for a few hours instead of a clothes dryer.
I always hang my clothes on the veranda.
view Orchid64's profile
I dry most of my clothes outside when weather permits. I always recycle. I carry my water in a reuseable bottle.
view boobles2's profile