Save Money - Line Dry your Laundry

Here's a money saving tip that will also save you time.
First - wash your clothes in cold water.
Next - use less detergent than recommended, as long as your clothes aren't rancidly dirty. I have a small container of ERA, (which I call Equal Rights Amendment,) for really tough stains. It will remove just about anything, but I also have a big refill size bottle of Shout stain remover, and a regular spray bottle of Shout that I have refilled numerous times. That's because we live in the country, the mountains, to be exact, and we're constantly getting schmootz on our clothes.
When the clothes are done, put them in the dryer for 5 minutes and set the heat anywhere from medium to high, depending on how much energy you want to save.
It's important to pull them out before the dryer goes to the cooling cycle. You want them to be steaming when you remove them from the dryer. On our wonderful dryer, that means setting the cycle to 10 minutes, because the last 5 minutes are the cooling off period.
After 5 minutes, take the clothes to your laundry line. (you do have one, right?)
Hang the clothes up so that they dry fairly wrinkle free.
Here's the time saving part: your clothes will dry as though they have been pressed.
Seriously.
I hang the pants up by the cuffs, with the waist pointed down. T-shirts, I put the clothespins on the arms - hanging them up in a kind of crucifixion configuration.
I love that ironing time has been reduced, and of course, that also saves on your electric bill, because then you don't have to burn $$ to operate the iron.
Although it's already cold where I live, I still hang the laundry out on clear-skied days, as long as it's above freezing. In the evening, I bring everything in and if it's still damp, I put it all on hangers in the bathroom, hanging from the shower curtain rod. By morning, it's all dry.
If it's too cold to hang clothes at all, I have an indoor line in -- my laundry room, which also happens to be the boiler room. The water heater and the boiler keep that room quite warm, even though I've turned down the temperature on the water heater to 100 degrees most of the time, as outlined in my previous post.
If your neighborhood has restrictions against line-drying clothes, you may have to skip all this and just go for the indoor drying.
However, the Times recently posted an article about the whole line-drying issue, and there was a photo of a really cool set up that's basically a -- how shall i describe this -- a square configuration of inset clotheslines. Huh? Well, I'll see if I can find a picture of one. But it was quite compact, and avoids the whole problem of displaying your undies to the neighbors. My line runs parallel to the back of the house, where the sun is, so no one ever gets to see our long underwear.
The Times article also mentioned that congress is considering enacting a "right to dry" law to get around neighborhood association restrictions. That's because we all need to cut down on our energy use, and drying clothes takes, I think they said, 6% of household electric usage.
Try this technique - you'll be imPressed with how pressed your clothes look.