The lint in the trap is your clothes

Everyone has this argument about electricity. The electricity is the smaller number.

Look in the lint trap. That is your clothing. Fabric, ground off a load at a time by heat and tumbling — which is also what fades the color, pills the surface, tires out the elastic and pulls things slowly out of shape. A dryer does not only cost you power. It charges a second time, in shirts.

Which reframes the whole question if money is tight. A t-shirt that lasts years rather than one season is worth considerably more than the kilowatt-hours, and the replacement is the cost you actually feel.

It is also worth knowing, if line drying has ever felt like something to be slightly embarrassed about, that a tumble dryer is not a universal appliance. Across much of the world it is uncommon in ordinary households, and hanging washing up is simply what people do.

Making it not horrible

Two complaints stop people, and both have answers.

Stiffness. Most of it is fibers drying matted flat, so shake each item out hard before it goes on the line — that one motion does the bulk of the work. A splash of vinegar in the rinse cycle came up again and again and leaves no smell. And the compromise people landed on, which feels like cheating: a short tumble with no heat at the end, which softens everything without doing any of the damage. Five minutes of dryer is not fifty.

Time and space. A folding rack is roughly the footprint of a chair and lives folded up between uses. What decides whether it works is not where it stands but whether air moves past it: a rack in a shut room takes days and smells; the same rack with a window cracked or a fan aimed at it is done overnight.

Lay knits flat rather than hanging them, or their own wet weight stretches them.

Where this genuinely does not work

Damp climates and damp rooms, and this is the one to take seriously — it is in the block above the advice for a reason. Drying a full load indoors in a room with no airflow puts litres of water into the air, and in a home already prone to condensation that grows mildew on the walls and a smell into the fabric that does not wash out.

Outdoors solves it, and is not always available: heavy pollen seasons are a real reason not to, and some buildings and housing associations forbid it, though local rules sometimes override that and it is worth checking rather than assuming.

And the same act inverts in a dry winter. Several people pointed out that laundry drying indoors in genuinely arid air works as a humidifier — less static, more comfortable air, and washing that dries fast because the air was thirsty to begin with. The honest footnote: evaporating that water takes heat out of the room, so in a house you are paying to heat it is not quite free.

Which is the real answer to the argument: it is not a question of whether air drying is better. It is a question of what your air is doing, and whether you would rather spend a shirt or a fan.