I'm curious as to why the question is directed specifically to Americans. Here in Norway there are also very few washing lines. My wife did have one thirty years ago but gave up using it because for half the year it's really not practical.
@ninalanyon I guess I was specifically wondering about Americans as I have family there and we were talking about it. I understand it not being practical in certain areas, I would imagine it could save a lot on electricity though.
@InterdimensionalSideEye What is "a lot" though? Most people I know don't even know how much electricity their appliances can use nor what the price per kWh is let alone what the actual usage and cost are.
My drier has a maximum power consumption of 2.350 kW. For a typical full load it runs for about 90 minutes and we (three of us) use the drier two or three times a week, say 10 times a month. That means that we use not more than:
2.35 kW x 1.5 hours x 10 times a month x 12 months in a year = 423 kWh/year.
The current price including various taxes and fees where I am is about 2 NOK/kWh. So it costs me about 846 NOK (88 USD, 77 EUR, 66 GBP) per year. But from November to March, about one third of the year, it's usually either too wet or too cold to dry outside.
Another way of looking at the cost is to divide it by the usual price of a cup of coffee in a cafe. Here in Norway the usual price for a cup of filter coffee with one refill is about 40 NOK so one year of tumble drying is 21.15 cups of coffee. Cut out the coffee once a fortnight and you have paid for the drying.
Personally it's a price I'm willing to pay but I can understand that for people living on minimum wages that saving 77 euros a year could be important.
@ninalanyon I get you - however where I live a dryer is a luxury if I used the same amount of electricity as you for drying my clothes I would be paying 1200 kr. The climate here is sunny and dry and I have room for a line, plus it’s better for a clothes. I think in Norway it’s a necessity and here it’s a luxury.
@InterdimensionalSideEye Before tumble driers were common it was quite usual here in Norway to have a drying cabinet in the washroom, typically in the cellar. It's about the size of an upright freezer with a heating element in the bottom and various ventilation holes. Electricity used to be very cheap here. I haven't seen one recently but they used to turn up in secondhand shops and flea markets occasionally. Tumble driers are much faster and use less electricity.
But I've seen similar things on Aliexpress lately that are supposedly portable and fan driven:
@InterdimensionalSideEye Expensive coffee is the price you pay for cafe employees having a decent income. But expensive is also relative.
A typical cafe visit for me in one of my favourite cafes (Skaperveket, Tønsberg, run by the Salvation Army) is a chili mocca coffee plus a slice of cheesecake that altogether costs 110 NOK.
A mocha at Costa Coffee in the UK, for instance, would be 4.60 GBP [1] which is 59 NOK, and that's about the same price as here in Norway. But the median income in USD PPP is more than 50% higher here (41 kUSD PPP versus 26 kUSD PPP) so my expensive coffee is smaller fraction of median income here than in the UK.
