In the US over 50% of homeowners or renters are not allowed to hang their clothes outside to dry.  Home owners associations have a great deal of power over our rights.  Some neighborhood also restrict rain barrels, outside vegetable gardens,  and solar panels.  My youngest daughter lives in one of those neighborhoods and the neighborhood she lived in before moving to Georgia also had the same restrictions.  She and her husband prefer living in highly controlled neighborhoods.  In her neighborhood she has to get permission to change the style of her mailbox and get permission to paint her house.  A committee decides if the paint color matches the profile of the community.  In their house one of the bedrooms did not have AC ducted into it.  It was a huge room that was like 20 by 20.  They were not allowed to use a window AC unit according to the neighborhood association.  They did not want to tear down the sheetrock and redo the room with the ductwork and then increase the capacity of their AC unit.  It would have been an expensive proposition.  Their backyard is huge and empties out into a forest.  Nobody could see the rear of their home unless they were lost in the woods and came up over the privacy fencing all around the yard.  I told them to go ahead and put a window unit in and to hang their laundry outside if they wanted to.  They were to frightened to do so and really wanted to fit into their uppity neighborhood. 

In the US 6% of our household utility bill goes to our dryers.  I live in Texas and our electric bill comes out to about $4800 a year.  Now if you do the math we pay the equivalent of paying for a new Maytag dryer each year.  It took a long time but I finally convinced my other daughter to hang her clothes outside.  I strung clotheslines and bought her clothespins.  Living here in the intense heat the clothes dry as quickly on the outside line as they would have dried in the dryer.  We generally get no more than 2 or 3 days a month of rain and unless it is a tropical storm the showers come in fast and leave quickly.   This is a perfect place to hang out clothes.  I surveyed the 300 homes in our area and found only 3 other homes that had clotheslines that I could see. 

My mother quit hanging out clothes when she got an electric dryer.  She did not want to look like we could not afford a dryer.  I find out that is why many people back in the day quit hanging out clothes.  Home owners associations thought it made the neighborhood look shabby.  Of course back then there were no home owner associations because once you bought your property you could do what you wanted to do. 

The benefits of outside drying are:

http://www.acontrario.org/node/398

According to a 2001 Department of Energy Study _ only the refrigerator and heating and cooling units top the cost of a dryer being used by Americans! If all Americans switched to line drying laundry we would save 6.5 billion dollars (of consumer money), and if they line dried just half their loads we would instantly decrease residential U.S. Carbon emissions by 3.3% according to a 2007 article in the New York Times.
Line drying will make your clothes last longer and decrease the need for ironing.
There are also safety concerns: the U.S. Fire Administration reports that dryers are responsible for 15 deaths, 300 injuries, 15,600 structure fires and $99 million dollars lost to damage yearly on average (data from 2002-2004). Moreover having people outside serves as an informal neighborhood crime watch.

Alexander Lee, a lawyer in Concord, N.H., who runs a Web site, Project Laundry List, to promote hanging clothes to dry, said the actual electricity consumption by dryers was probably three times as much as federal estimates because those estimates did not take into account actual use at laundromats and in multifamily homes.

I just read where Ontario is handing out free clotheslines to anyone willing to become eco friendly by solar drying their laundry. 

In the last year state lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have overridden these local rules with legislation protecting the right to hang laundry outdoors, citing environmental concerns because clothes dryers use at least 6 percent of all household electricity consumption.

Florida and Utah already had such laws, and similar bills are being considered in Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia, clothesline advocates say.

.A new documentary is coming out called “Drying For Freedom. a Film About Clotheslines.  http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/boston/new-documentary-drying-for-freedom-a-film-about-clotheslines-093774 

The above is a link to the 5 minute trailer.  You will turn off your dryer after watching it….

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