American Bedwetter

Since 1904

Solar Dryer
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Solar Dryer

15.95

Why hang around waiting for the dryer to finish? Improve your laundry experience with an American Bedwetter solar clothes dryer. Allocate a few minutes to some fresh air, listening to the birds and feeling the sun on your skin as you mount your clothes on the dryer using the included C-47s. Works well on sunny, warm, or windy days as long as there’s no rain.

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Discussion

Life is very busy, and we all appreciate “labor saving” appliances like a clothes dryer sometimes. But the electrical appliance has its downsides: at the laundromat, you have to wait for it; at home, it lets you get back to being busy. What’s wrong with being busy, you ask? Why should we be busy, I say.

We live our lives at a frenetic pace that only seems to be going faster with time. Telecommunications advances like mobile phones and tablets have us drinking from the information firehose, and encourage employers and friends to expect 24/7 availability. We’re living in a world where there’s so much going on, you have to struggle to be first to speak to be heard at all.

Perhaps the best way to win is to not play. And if we can’t leave the game, at least we can skip a round here and there. Leave the enchanted shackle in the house and enjoy a few minutes of peace while hanging the laundry. The birds chirping in the trees. The distant drone of thoroughfares. The hints of flower in the spring, grass in the summer, leaves in the autumn.

The lessons here:

  • There is value to be found with a different perspective.
  • Quality of life is worth considering in how you approach life’s chores.

Related thoughts

“Green” often is a lie. A clothesline might actually be green, but paying extra for windpower suffers the same problem that “emission free” hydrogen cars do: it’s just moving the emissions around.

Proponents (typically marketing) of most “green” technology pretend it’s all powered by green sources or they do an extreme close-up of one part of a process, and hide/ignore the rest. In reality, we simply don’t produce enough green power to manufacture the volumes of hydrogen we need… well, perhaps currently while there’s only a few prototypes on the road, but that’s disingenuous. Once production is ramped up to meet volume, it’ll be back to nukes, coal and other fossil fuels to supply the power for electrolysis to make the hydrogen. And even now, every kilowatt spent making hydrogen from solar power is another kilowatt not green somewhere else. Like this:

Grid power supplied = grid power consumed + grid loss (inefficiency)

Which I think is obvious? If you want to use power, you have to make it somewhere; it doesn’t spring from nothingness. So when adding a process to make hydrogen, you have to account for the energy:

Power supplied + additional power to make hydrogen = Power consumed + Hydrogen + Loss

And if we break down power into bad/good ways of making power:

Bad power supplied + Good power supplied + additional power to make hydrogen = Power consumed + hydrogen + loss

So marketing says: Oh, and only green fuels were used for hydrogen! They’re pretending this is true, but really:

(Bad power + power to make up for that usurped to make hydrogen) + (Good power - green energy usurped for hydrogen) + (100% green power to make hydrogen) = = Power consumed + hydrogen + loss

You can replace your gasoline car with a diesel or vice versa, but there’s still fuel required; we see that. And you can switch your furnace between gas/propane/heating oil (diesel with colorant), but you still have to put some kind of fuel in. With any of these, you know somewhere or other the fuel got dug out of the ground. Perhaps a given fuel is better or worse, but they all have impact. And conceivably, you could trace the fuel back to a point of origin. (Where it was dug up/extracted.)

The difference with electric is you can’t see where it comes from. Once power enters the grid, it’s all the same, all homogenized. Does the 40 watts to run my laptop come from green sources, or a coal plant, or Ginna nuke plant, or where? You could say that because I pay $5 a month extra for wind power, that it’s all coming from a wind farm. But if you shut down enough fossil fuel and/or nuclear plants, I still suffer a brownout or blackout. So is it really true my energy sourced from wind power?

Green power is significantly marketing and psychology: we’re glad of the self-deception so we can feel good, tell ourselves we did our part as we continue to exploit the planet. The real solution is that we need to live in a simpler, less power-hungry way, cutting our population… but few are willing to do that. It’s easier to believe the white (green) lies because the alternative is to change our lives, which is inconvenient. Perhaps green tech makes a dent, lowering impact or changing its manner, but is it curing the problem? Not really, it’s just mitigating it to a degree.

Apologies to all the science nuts for inconsistency about power vs. energy. I’m using them colloquially, not technically, but the argument stands.

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