Save Money and Lower Your Electric Bill While Doing Laundry

Here's another hub with information that I used while working for my local Community Action Agency. This hub contains information to help you conserve energy while doing your laundry!

Almost every time I hunch over to transfer wet clothes from my washer to my dryer, I keep myself from groaning by picturing the women who spent hours every week doing laundry before the convenient invention of a machine to do it for them! I even think of my time in Ecuador, when I would sometimes walk over the bridge and see dozens of women sitting in the river washing their families' clothes by hand. Boy, am I glad to be a woman in the time and place that I am right now!

Still, as convenient as this machinery is, it is quite energy consuming. Here are some tips to save money and conserve energy while washing, drying, and ironing!

Sure, sometimes, you just need that one pair of nice pants to be cleaned really quick, so you run an entire load for them. But for usual laundry, it is much better to do a full load than one or two pieces of clothing. Sort clothes and schedule laundering so you can wash only full loads. It takes almost as much electricity to run a small load as it does a full one, and it is better for the machine to have a full load during the spin cycle so it doesn't fly off balance.

Put the temperature selector on cold or warm. Every once in a while you may have a load that require warm water, but tests show that cold water detergents are very effective for cleaning fabric in cold water. Hot water isn't always necessary, and nixing it can save you a bundle on your heating bill. Make sure you rinse on cold, too!

Think "Less is more". Use the amount of laundry detergent that the manufacturer recommends. Using more detergent than necessary actually gets in the way of effective cleansing of the fabrics, which will then require an extra rinse cycle, which uses more energy and water.

Dry a full load in your dryer, but don't overload. It uses way to much energy, and it causes excessive wrinkling, which in turn may force you to iron your clothes, using even more energy. If you really want to save, just don't use a dryer at all, or save it for fashion emergencies.

Set the timer on your dryer for the minimum time needed to dry your clothes. You can always add an extra ten or fifteen minutes at the end, but over-drying wastes energy and harms fabrics. Double-whammy!

Takes out your clothes and fold them or hang them up right away, before wrinkles have time to set it. This will cut out the need for ironing, which saves electricity and your time.

My sister never does this, and it drives me up a wall. I don't know if she forgets, or if she is just lazy, but this bad habit wastes a lot of energy! Don't forget to clean the lint filter after each and every drying cycle! Educate the members of your household, and make a friendly sign and post it on the dryer door if you think that will help.

If possible, try to set up your dryer in a place that is ventilated with fresh, dry air. Humid air circulating through the machine increases drying time and energy needed. Make sure the vent for the humid dryer air is well secured. At one point, ours was allowing hot, humid air to escape so that the laundry room became a steam room.

Instead of letting your iron sit while it heats up, iron clothes that require a cooler iron first, and work up to the clothes that require a higher heat. Remember that your iron heats faster than it cools, so it's quicker to iron from low-heat to high-heat than the reverse. Which leads me to our last tip...

Go ahead and turn off the iron a few minutes before your finish. The iron takes a while to cool, so you'll be able to complete the last bunch of your clothes with the heat remaining. Also, turn off the iron when your work is interrupted so you don't end up leaving it on for hours.