         
Blog posts in May 2009 by catherinedWhen our tumble dryer went wrong in the summer last year we spent many weeks trying to find, contact and wait for an engineer to come and fix it. Unfortunately, despite being less than 8 years old, it was deemed to be beyond repair (the parts alone would have cost more than a new one, even without allowing for labour). I started looking for the most environmentally friendly dryer I could find but then noticed that our electricity use had almost halved. We take weekly energy measurementsand enter them on to imeasure and this clearly showed that our electricity use had gone right down when the tumble dryer stopped working. (It was a very wet summer last year). So I decided to see if we could manage without - quite a challenge for a family with young children (we hadn't had or needed a tumble dryer before we had children!) I bought some extra clothes (2nd hand) for our extremely active 2 year old so that we wouldn't run out of things for her to wear if we had a prolonged period of bad weather and set off on a journey of discovery... We bought a wooden clothes airer to use inside http://www.argos.co.uk/wcsstore/argos/images/111-8505394A68UC402338M.jpg and made good use ofour existing washing line.
We've become far more in-touch with the weather now but have problems with condensation inside the house, especially in the room with the airing cupboard that we use for drying clothes on wet days. As this was becoming our daughter's bedroom we needed an additional solution.
The plan is to create an external undercover drying area, by buying a wooden pergola and adding a rigid, transparent plastic roof. http://www.selections.com/GF2534/rustic-rose-garden-pergola/ This pergola is FSC and guaranteed for 15 years (considerably more than the tumble dryer!) It is also considerable cheaper than buying a new tumble dryer (and that's before you take into account the energy use) and should look very nice with a kiwi vine trained up it...
Blog post by catherined on May 25, 2009 at 1:38 p.m. No comments have been posted yet. |