The Solar-Powered Laundry Dryer still works in November

Here are some numbers:

Six Haneys have been at the house for the holidays since the weekend so it's time for Laundry.  7 loads that is--including all the towels, napkins and place mats.  Total this would take about six hours in the dryer.  The dryer is typically the second most expensive and energy-consuming appliance in the average household after the water heater.  Check out this chart from the US Department of Energy.

But it's a nice sunny breezy day so with the spare time on vacation we decided to use the solar powered laundry dryer to save some electricity.  Don't you have a solar-powered laundry dryer?  The line pins and poles runs at $100 or less. Talk to your local hardware store.  Now who'd have thought solar power for less than $100!  Tell your friends.

Today's high in the mountains of Virginia in November was 51, and it was in the low 40's when I started hanging laundry.  After 7 total hours of sunlight not all of the laundry dried completely outside, but most of it did.  Keep in mind, seven loads is quite a bit of laundry.  A total of 80 minutes in the dryer did the rest.  So think 80 minutes of running the dryer vs 6 hours (360 min).

Now the numbers:

The sticker on the dryer says it's rated at 28Amps at 240Volts.  By multiplying those, the dryer uses 6,720 Watts, or 6.72 kilo Watts of power.
For every hour we run it we use 6.72 kWh  KiloWatt Hours
It costs about 11 cents per kWh on the average electric bill.
So it costs about $ 0.74 to run it for an hour.
Since we hung the laundry reducing our dryer time by about 4 hours 40 min
That is a savings on the electric bill of about $3.47 today.

Now $3.47 isn't very much. It could buy half a gallon of good milk.  Pay for 1/3 of the labor time I spent hanging the laundry.  Not all that much.  But if every laundry day we saved that energy, think how much money we could save.  About $15 per month!

The internet tells me we get about 0.95 kWh per pound of coal burned.  Our savings today is 31.4 pounds of coal.  That makes it worth it to me.  We saved 31 pounds of coal with the solar energy.  Approximately 4x10^-5 acres of coal.  Not much.

So is it worth it?  If you ask me. Yes.  Climate change, habitat loss from fossil fuels, these problems are very large and scary.  But if we each do our part, we can get through all this.  Baby steps.  If enough people hung their laundry yesterday we could make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, land destruction from.

Since today is Thanksgiving, lets make sure we are thankful for the infrastructure of the electric grid, and the system in place that allows laundry drying to be so easy.  If that goes down we'll all be doing a lot of laundry hanging.  Think how many people in the world wash their laundry by hand, and dry it without electricity.  Think how much less resources they use.  Think of their lifestyle in all regards besides laundry.  Maybe try it out.

Happy Thanksgiving!