For the entirety of my life, we've hung or clothes to dry inside. No dryer. No, they don't smell bad. Yes, even with small kids in the household. No, there is no problem with mold. No, it doesn't take forever, I'd estimate twelve hours most of the year, depending on how fast you spun them (typically 1200+ rpm).
Yes, the evaporating cools down the room, though I can't say I ever noticed it. In terms of energy efficiency compared to a dryer, it's much better in summer, and not much better in winter, though you get a humidifier as a freeby.
Yes, it's a chore, a full load takes about ten minutes to hang, and it's real boring work.
Have you only lived in one climate? One type of house?
There are a lot of different buildings and climates where you will have problems hanging laundry indoors. It definitely can cause mould, it definitely is a health risk without paying extra for dehumidifiers. And dehumidifiers are not great for the environment either as well as costing extra.
So two good reasons to hang out rather than in.
Plus hanging laundry outdoors dries them much, much quicker too. They can be dry in 2 hours most of the time, compared to up to 2 days inside.
> Dryer did not exists and human have been drying clothes in most climates in the last few thousand of years.
Washing machines did not exist until recently either, but no one in this thread is advocating hand washing their clothes.
> That being said : I see what you mean. I grew up in France ( dryer don’t exists ) and it’s easy to dry stuff there. Except maybe in winter.
In the US dryers and washing machines are a set pair. If a washing machine is in a location then a dryer is there also unless someone went out of their way to only buy a washing machine. For example laundromats all have dryers as does any laundry room in an apartment complex or apartments with washing machines.
> Washing machines did not exist until recently either, but no one in this thread is advocating hand washing their clothes.
This conversation is about people being denied the right to do something, the reasons why they should have the right to do so are there to justify it. No one said people should not be able to wash their laundry by hand. It is probably because doing so is unobserved. That being said, it is also a much more challenging thing to advocate for. While hanging one's clothes is marginally more labour intensive, washing clothes by hands is much more labour intensive.
> In the US dryers and washing machines are a set pair.
I understand what you are getting to, but the presence of both does not imply that both receive the same level of use. For some people, the use of driers is purely seasonal. For others, it will only be used for large items or things that need to be dried quickly. As for the examples of laundromats and shared facilities, the complimentary pair is intended to attract customers (not to mention that hauling around wet clothes is a pain).
It seems to me that you are trying to shift discussion from "should it be allowed to hang cloth outside" and "if I am forced to dry them inside is it good idea to use dryer" into "in a world where I am allowed to hang them inside, is the dryer absolutely necessary".
The answer to your question does not really matter, cause the topic the rest of us discuss is "should drying cloth outside be allowed".
I'd add that dehumidifiers are basically air conditioners they just focus on making sure the water is removed from the air before it leaves the device.
Where do you live? Winter is when people traditionally use humidifiers because the air inside tends to be dry. (Cold air outside has a low absolute humidity, so relative humidity will be low when you heat it up inside.)
I dunno about that - I live in Norway. Most folks dry their clothes inside for most of the year. They take a little longer to dry in the winter, but it really isn't an issue.
Having lived in both Norway and England, Norwegian houses are much warmer and drier indoors during the winter. Every house in England I lived in was damp, basically uninsulated and had terrible heating systems.
London has an interesting climate - despite being fairly far north it doesn't get that cold in winter. It is common there to not have whole house heating. Norway isn't far London, but it is enough worse a climate that pretty much everyone has some form of central heating and keeps their house warm year round.
For this discussion is means that in London the indoor climate is livable, but terrible for trying clothes, while in Norway the indoor climate is nice and drying clothes indoors is helpful for adding humidity.
Note that Oslo is at 59.9 degrees northern latitude, while London is at 51.5 degrees northern latitude. Going the same 8.4 degrees south from London takes you to the Pyrenees, or Florence.
I haven't been to Norway, but I've been to Sweden which seems like it should be similar. All houses there have central heating.
Maybe you are thinking about district heating? There are a few places in the world where the heat for an entire town comes from the same plant and is piped around. This is also called central heating which makes it confusing, thought district heating is the more correct term from what I can tell. I'm talking about a single heating system that handles the whole house, not a system that handles the whole town.
No, they aren't. Most houses that I've been in have electric heating, but not central heating. Folks heat each room seperately. Occasionally, it is baseboard heat. More commonly, it is portable heaters or electric panel heaters hung on a wall and plugged into a socket. Heated floors in the restroom are fairly common.
I personally have a small attic apartment in Trondheim (Norway). It has bathroom floor heat and came with one wall panel: I actually just use one oil-filled electric radiator and keep a fairly cool bedroom. Wood heating is pretty common too - one of the scents of fall is the lighting of fireplaces.
That said, more central heating is starting to become popular in the form of heat pumps, but I honestly only know one person that has one - and they are on a farm in the countryside instead of here in the city.
> I lived for years in Paris. Dryer don’t exists there. You just don’t have space for one … Is the weather THAT different in London ?
Do you not have space for a washing machine either? In many apartments in the US the dryer is stacked on top of the washing machine. It doesn't consume any additional space.
It’s worse if you live in a well insulated energy-efficient building. In winter it’s cold so nobody wants to open the windows. The lack of ventilation means that the moisture has nowhere to go and just accumulates.
Shouldn't be if your building was designed properly, with a proper Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV) e.g. [0]. The long and short of it, fresh air is slightly heated by stale outgoing moist air.
We're in central Europe. A few degrees colder than London in Winter, I doubt it matters. I've done it in houses built a hundred years ago (though they were modernized since, obviously) and ones that were build recently with high degrees of insulation (almost but not quite passive). Not an issue. I usually did open the windows for a couple of minutes.
Forced air and radiators dry the air equally. Steam radiators sometimes can add humidity to the air it is limited and only when they are initially heating up before the valve closes. What causes dry air in the winter is the act of heating air up. Relative humidity is based on the temperature of the air, so if there is a fixed amount of water in the air, as you heat it the relative humidity goes down. So in the winter cold air slowly comes into the house via air leakage. This air is heated up which drops its relative humidity down. I have lived in houses with baseboard heat and with forced air, and recently converted my house from baseboard heat to forced air. There is no real difference in the relative humidity in the house.
Forced Air generally increase the exchange of new air from outside. Individual rooms will tend to be above or below ambient pressure which causes an exchange of air with the outside. Carefully balanced systems can minimize the effect, but homes are rarely built with this in mind.
You can get a related effect with thermostats which raise and lower the house’s temperature over the day as air expands with increased temperature.
That is definitely an issue that is out there. Sadly cheap builders try and get away with a single return per floor in a house which is simply not enough. My point is mostly that forced air versus hydronic isn't what causes a difference in dryness of air. It largely comes down to the quality of the install of each and the tightness of the home. Hydronic is typically more expensive and tends to be found it better built homes. My house is an exception to that rule though, I am still working on sealing up air leaks from where all the pipes ran for our baseboard heat.
The way I understand this at the gut, conversational level, is by noticing that hot air can carry more water, therefore it will dry your skin faster, which is what "feels" like the air being dry.
Heating doesn't remove water from the air, as you explained. But that's what people assume when they argue that "heating doesn't dry the air" as I've heard in the past. Using relative humidity is a good explanation.
Even so, it does not explain why one method of heating the air would feel different than another, unless there is something physically different in their effects.
Radiant heat feels somewhat different than warm air, but if radiant heat from the radiators of a steam or water system is significant, would that not make them feel dryer? Our house has water radiators, and I do not notice the radiant heat from them.
I believe Retric's explanation is the correct one, given that human activity tends to increase the absolute humidity of interior air.
You can use a drying rack. They fold up and can be put away. As long as you don't live in the tropics chances are good humidity will always be low enough to dry in a day.
I wear ASICS/Uniqlo/Next/Adidas/Express/etc level clothing ($5 to $30 per item) and it lasts many years (5+) even though I use washers and dryers constantly.
Cannot imagine additional longevity would be worth all the work of manually doing it.
That’s mostly sport wear brands. You can’t wear that at work in most of the world.
I doubt Uniqlo clothes last five years while tumble dried. I hand dry the few t-shirts I own from them and after three years I wouldn’t wear them as anything else than bed wear.
I am wearing a Uniqlo undershirt right now that I bought before 2018. I don’t see any wear and tear.
When I used to wear business casual, I wore Next brand clothing and shirts/trousers looked the same to me even after years of drying and cleaning them. The part that starts showing wear is the fold in the collar, but that only happens a long time after I have gotten my $20 or $30 worth.
I am sure there are some visual differences between top tier clothes and what I wear, but I am okay with it as long as what I have looks clean and presentable.
it depends on the fabric materials used. not all of them are prone to degradation from dryer heat. i didn't notice it until my wife told me about it so now i make an effort to dry my nicer clothes on a stand rather than in the dryer.
Your message would be much better without all the combative yes/no assumptions that the reader had any one the assumptions you thought you were dispelling.
I think this is either irrelevant, or inconsiderate if the point was to suggest "They should just be ok with this other thing I was ok with instead of what they want to do." without the excuse that what they want is somehow bad for everyone else. She's not raising chickens, and even the bit about the horrors of seeing "unmentionables" is ridiculous and deserves no consideration at all.
I find my clothes smell nicer after having hung outside rather than inside, and e.g. towels are softer due to blowing in the wind. I only hang them outside in summer. No need for a dryer of course.
I hang my clothes to dry inside as I live in a small appartement in the city. It goes quite quickly even you spun normally. Tumble drying and fast spinning destroy clothes and it’s a big no with wool. Is it unusual in the US?
Then again, if I had the space, I would definitely dry them outside. Nothing beats the smell of clothes hung outside in the sun.
When I lived in the Czech Republic for two years I didn't have a dryer, had to air dry my clothes. There wasn't a smell issue, but my underwear felt like sandpaper compared to how it felt after going through a dryer.
Water evaporating absorbs energy - the transition from liquid to gas takes more energy than changing the temperature of the water, so drying the clothes is a net reduction of energy in the surrounding air.
It relies on the air not being saturated (and for real effectiveness, requires relatively low humidity). It's quite popular in dry climates in the form of a "swamp cooler".
Adding water to the air is literally adding latent heat. That's what the term means. Point taken about how that decreases sensible heat, though, thanks.
Yes, the evaporating cools down the room, though I can't say I ever noticed it. In terms of energy efficiency compared to a dryer, it's much better in summer, and not much better in winter, though you get a humidifier as a freeby.
Yes, it's a chore, a full load takes about ten minutes to hang, and it's real boring work.