Saving Money in Drying Clothes and Humidifiers and Saving water

Energy Cost Reduction by
What this article helps in:
Saving money, one quarter at a time or 1 kWh at a time
--> drying clothes over several hours, teaching you patience and planning
Reducing the dryness in your room in winters
-->Reduce electricity bills for running humidifiers

So let us see what activity would enable us to all this.

We all know that in winter, rooms in centrally heated houses (almost all houses in US) get fairly dry.

You wake up in the middle of the night, with an incredibly dry mouth, and a possibly dry nose. You drink water, then you reach for your saline drops or saline sprays to moisten your nose and then try to go back to sleep.

How can you prevent this from occurring in winter? Well, option 1 is that you can buy a humidifier and run it at full blast all through the night. But this will cost you money and also increase your electricity bill.

Now consider a cheaper option, drying your washed, (damp) clothes on a rack, that work out in big savings. It may not guarantee the exact comfort offered by the humidifier, but it contributes fairly well to reducing your discomfot.

*Note* this method is more suitable for homes with hardwood floors.

What you can do is to go get a clothes drying rack and keep it in your bedroom. Now if you take your clothes after washing them in a machine when they are fairly damp (after the spin cycle), then you can lay them out to dry in the clothes rack and let them dry over the next day or two (30-50 hours).

Well that is the time it takes to dry clothes when we keep our thermostat at 70 F. It might also help to position the clothes rack closer to the heater in the room. This way the heat meets the moisture sooner, and your clothes dry faster.

Some points to note:

>> This method is less of a pain if you dry only your larger clothes on a line. Laying out several small pieces like socks, handkerchiefs, underwear etc take a lot of time and you might get annoyed using the clothes rack.. It is still better to use a dryer for those anyway.

>> Do not be attempting to lay out clothes when you are in a hurry to do something else. Again you might get annoyed and just switch to the dryer. So planning is important.

>> Do not place extremely wet clothes on a rack in a room, it might create puddles causing a slipping risk on the floor (or wet your carpet - turning it into a germ growth medium..eww).

>> Continue using your humidifier till you get used to this system. Keep saline sprays as a backup.
Further to save water resources you can recycle any water from the humidifier in this manner explained in the Lean Mean Green Family Blog
Keeping in tune with the saving water pledge that I signed up recently with BRITA's campaign, I am going to request you too sign up for the pledge and do your bit for our watersheds and the planet. Plus you SAVE MONEY by reducing your spending on disposable bottles.



If you sign up for the pledge, please leave a comment for me too right here . Thank you.