Last week or so our dryer decided it was going to stop working properly. As luck would have it, the washer and dryer and the ONLY two appliances we’re responsible for in our rental contract so until I figure out how to fix it or get someone else to do so, we’re stuck with either frequenting the local laundromat or doing something else. Currently, I choose the “something else” option and decided to get out the Umbrella-Style Clothes Dryer which mostly just collects dust for if/when an emergency occurs… but not today! It got put to good use. 🙂
Setup is really simple. Just open up the bottom base so the legs are spread out, tighten the wing nut to keep them from moving, and attach the upper section (the one with all the clotheslines). There’s a second wing nut to tighten and once erected it should look similar to this:
If you’ll notice in the photo above I highlighted in red the upper right-hand corner where, though maybe not so obvious, the clotheslines got wrapped around one of the poles during setup. I didn’t notice it at first but the trouble became clear as day when I started hanging clothes. The fix took but a few seconds to unravel the mess. Once properly setup you can begin hanging clothes from it as such:
I was able to hang what amounted to about a full load of normal laundry for us with some room to spare. I wound up using about 50 clothespins though I would have needed more (100 would have been plenty) had I more clothes to hang.
In order to speed up drying I placed a large box fan on our sofa table like so:
After rotating the clothes every 20-30 minutes it took about five hours for the entire batch to be dry with the help of the fan. I think next time I’ll just move the clothes to be underneath a ceiling fan. 😉 Of course, you don’t have to use a fan or even the clothes dryer but expect the time to dry to be much, much longer.
Overall, the entire process worked out just fine and the Umbrella-Style Clothes Dryer performed as expected… now to get the darn dryer working again. 🙂
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