We made a deliberate decision not to buy a Clothes Dryer.  The benefits we feel this provides us is significant savings in energy, we know that Clothes Dryers are not rated by EnergyStar.  Not using a clothes dryer also prolongs the life of our clothes; the drying machine environment is somewhat hostile to clothes and does damage them.

We line dry all of our clothes in converted attic space.  We did not finish this area; to reduce the dust from the house insulation we covered it all with Radiant Barrier insulation.  Radiant Barrier insulation is basically a thicker version of aluminum (baking) foil.  This is easy to install with a knife and a staple gun.

As we have never used a clothes dryer in our home we do not know how much energy and money it is saving us.  The US Department of Energy estimates an average Clothes Dryer uses 1800 to 5000 watts.

If we pick a middle value, of 3000 watts, and assume that it takes ONE hour to dry a load of washing and we (in our home) on average do about four loads per week (which is half the US average), we get.

• for kwh price: US Department of Energy.
• for average US family washes: EnergyStar.gov.  This actually lists the number of loads washed by the average US family, each load needs to be dried. 400 loads per year is around 8 per week.

We believe we do around half the loads of washing of the average US family. For the avergage US family doing 8 loads per week living in North Carolina the cost saving would be $124.80 per year, plus the savings one would have by either not buying or not replacing a clothesdryer.