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Comment by wowoc | Hacker News Reader

I live in Eastern Europe. How else do dry your clothes apart from hanging them?

Not sure if you're joking or not ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer )... A couple of years ago I was sat on a train passing through Flanders (one of the richer regions in Western Europe), next to a Texan family. The husband noticed a clothes rack full of towels on a terrace, and exclaimed 'Look at that! Did you see that?! They don't have a clothes dryer! Those poor people, we should thank God we were born in Texas!'. Which was followed by much commiseration about how hard it was to find a proper church on holidays.

Living on the Texas Gulf coast, we line-dry clothes in the summer, when it isn't too humid. Our nosey old blue-haired neighbor had to comment to another neighbor about how unfortunate it was for us that our clothes-dryer had obviously broken, and we must not be able to afford a new one. What's really funny is that we have a privacy fence around three sides of our fairly large back yard. Due to the part of the yard where the clothes are hung, the view of the clothes is very limited from the street.

Not joking. But I had my suspicions, I think I might have seen a clothes dryer in American movies or something.

BTW. We have -30°C winters and we still get by without them. We just hang our clothes indoors, next to a radiator.

Tumble drier. I've never understood the things. (<-- UK-based).

Dryers. Spin the clothes at high heat. Damaging to delicate stuff, but fine for blue jeans.

However, that's in part because the eastern half of the U.S. is very humid. Even in the summer, anything that is out of direct sunlight will take a long time to dry. A typical 30-degree summer day in NYC will have a dewpoint of 23 (and yes, it's as icky as it sounds). In California (where 30 degrees means low humidity and is quite nice) you could probably hang-dry.

You're actually blowing out a significant amount of the fabric.

Where do you think dryer lint comes from?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer

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