Scenes like this grace the countryside throughout Lancaster County, and it got me thinking about line-drying our own clothes.
Just before I left for vacation in June, we got a power bill and it was a doozie! The weather had been warm so the air conditioner had been running at full-tilt, but as I always do after a higher-than-normal electric bill, I start to look for where to trim the excess power consumption:
- Close my garage door: I have a habit of leaving our garage door open. The morning sun comes screaming in heating up the space. This makes our garage fridge work harder.
- Turn off extra lights. MOST of our house uses CFL lightbulbs, but not all of them. The bathrooms have many incandescent bulbs and we need to be better about turning them off.
- Don’t use my big oven when I can use my toaster oven to do the same job. If I’m just baking chicken breasts, I can pop them in our smaller toaster oven, which does the same job in a smaller space.
But the biggest — or at least a top 3 — culprit is probably our clothes dryer. I saw a couple friends take part in a 30-Day Dryer Challenge earlier this year and at the time I thought to myself “No! Never!”, but after (a) this past power bill and (b) driving through the back roads of Lancaster County on a laundry day, I began to mellow to the thought.
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