Solar Powered Clothes Dryer Building

Looking to see if anyone has thoughts on a solar powered clothes dryer that I may be overlooking :)

Here's the current state of things:
- We have a washing machine, and no clothes dryer, so hang everything out on a line stretched out in the yard. Currently the line holds about 1 load of laundry.
- We live in Warrnambool, Temperate/Mediterranean climate with lots of wind and cool wet winters (not super wet though, just wet enough to wet the laundry again just before it dries)
- We will have a wood fire cook stove inside which can be used to dry some things in the winter, but with a tiny house I'd prefer to keep laundry out of the kitchen as much as possible
- Any roofed structure we build needs to be under 10m2 otherwise we need a permit
- If we simply built a long roof over the laundry line, I'm worried that the wind would just blow clothes into the rain or blow the rain onto the clothes

Queue solar powered clothes dryer building! I'm thinking a square-ish structure with an angled roof and multiple lines through it to hang clothes from at different heights following the angle of the roof.

- There's an area that could work for it between a shed and our future greenhouse (or the future greenhouse could swap places and it could be on the end). This would give it protection from the East, South, and West, but more than likely have the front of it opened so the hot North winds would still hit the clothes.
- We have a large amount of light grey paving tiles that could be used for the floor. Could paint these dark to hold the heat better?
- A few different materials we could use for the roof. Main thing is to keep the rain off while still letting the sun in. Most clear building materials say about UV protection, not sure if that is better to have or worse for drying clothes vs fading clothes?
- Winter sun is in the North, would it be better to angle the roof up toward the winter sun (which would mean the clothes in the front would shade everything behind them but let in more sun without going through the roofing material) or down with the highest point to the South (meaning all the clothes should get roughly the same amount of light through the roof)?

Also would like to know, is this all just a silly idea and I'm overlooking a much better option? I can draw up what I'm thinking if the points above make it hard to picture :)
Appreciate any thoughts and input, thanks!!

Why not just hang the clothes on an external clothes line like the rest of Australia does?
Clothes lines of Australia

roofs over clothlines work we have a cloths line in the carport (never used for cars) I live in a wet and windy area with high humidity cloths take a few days to dry outside unless it's high summer and they are in the sun. The roof is an old asbestos roof so they dry in the shade, the only issue we have is that it is not very tall so sheets like to drag on the ground.

That's what we've been doing, but unfortunately we get pretty constant rain through the winter here...pretty much everyone I know has a covered patio attached to their house where they can hang their clothes, but we aren't able to do that with the setup of our house and the land

@John

I think you will find that wind is a much more important drying factor than the solar. Damp clothes in an enclosed space will very quickly saturate the air with humidity.

Thinking carefully about solar gain will help, but make sure that the ventilation is unrestricted.

I think this should be feasable, although not the simplest solution.  I was off the island last week and on my way back a drying structure caught my eye.  It was a simple open sided structure (at least on three sides) with a rotary drier: see this one from Dunelm Mill if you're not sure what I mean.  If you can situate it so that it is sheltered from the wettest, strongest winds I don't think you'd need much over hang so 9m2 ought to do, since these hold a lot of washing.  These driers tend to fold away (although you may need to check height access to dismantle) so the structure could be used as a shady sitting area in summer perhaps.
Drying washing outside can be a problem here on Skye since wet and windy is the default year round!  I have my garden line set up now, but I often have to use the airer in the kitchen.

Those are some great ideas, thank you! Sounds like it may be better for the structure to go on the end where the greenhouse was going to go, that way it can have 2-3 sides open instead of 1-2. And the other thing I was worried about was how much hanging space we'd have, but a hills hoist would definitely provide enough space, as well as potentially let me rotate the lines if there are clothes at the back that aren't getting enough sun :)

Don't know how this would work for you, but I'm a dumpster diver, and there are always lots of plastic clothes hangers to be found, some that are regular hanger shaped, some that have clips. I hang my wet wash on them (I get creative so things get shaped right as I don't iron anything except silk) and then put that on a bar or line to dry. This lets me increase the amount of hanging I can get in my limited space that will dry things (depending on weather it's indoors or out.) Be sure to leave air flow space around them. The problem with using just long lines is everything hangs edge to edge and requires a lot of line to hold it, this turns the edges 90 degrees off the line, giving you effectively more line space. Wooden hangers would work well too, wire ones work to a point, tend to leave weird kinks in the shoulders of the garments.

A thought with your outdoor/wet etc... look at how a solar dehydrator works https://permies.com/t/73890/Solar-Dehydrator-Plans-WheatonATC-model  and



If you used a solar heat collector like that, and put it so the heat output is hitting your drying space, perhaps you can keep it drying faster than the rain can get it!  

:D

Agree with Pearl, also agree that 3 sides open, even 4 sides open would be best.

When I was hang drying everything I own and living in a 400 sq ft apartment, I put up tension rods in my extra deep window sills, and hung everything on hangers. Underwear/socks got clothespinned to the hangars. Way less space than a normal clothes line and things dried nicely and in shape and were very convenient to be put away.

My solution would be to hang a few rods, one on top of each other, at roughly the spacing of your longest sweaters.  I much prefer a solidly attached dowel to a flimsy wire.

Allternaticely, you can even get those  clothes lines on pulleys that stash the rods our of the way when not in use - that would mean you could use your clothes drying shed for, say an outdoor covered patio or place to dry produce at other times.  The local Mennonites tend to do this on their covered verandahs for wet weather.

Perhaps buy or make something like this:

https://www.amazon.ca/Clothes-Ceiling-Mounted-Dryer-Seperate-Capacity/dp/B00JDC7IAG/

I would just build a roof on four posts with clothes lines under it.  As Michael mentioned, if you keep the rain off, the air flow will do the drying.

One thought I had is, if you're going to build a greenhouse, then you could just put lines in the greenhouse. I sometimes dry clothes in the greenhouse, though it's not the driest atmosphere in winter. But it works.

Here are a couple of clothes drying concepts that you might find interesting:

https://permies.com/t/131212/Clothesline-Hut-making-life-easier

https://permies.com/t/150230/Solar-dehydrator-laundry

I live in a similar climate, though probably a bit more damp. For half of the year, it's just too damp to dry anything outside. Even when it's not raining, it's either damp because the morning dew soaked everything (including the air) or it's in the shade, or it's getting soaked again from the dew as the air cools once the sun sets behind the trees.

Depending on how damp your air is, sheltering the clothes might not help too much. It'll prevent the dew from falling on the clothes, but not from the humidity in the air. This might be enough in your circumstance, though, especially if you have drier air and a longer span of time between morning and nightime dew.

I wonder if there's a way to passively dehumidify the air in your shelter?

We're in eastern Victoria and have similar issues - the hills hoist is in full sun, on a hill, lots of sun but stuff only comes in mostly dry after a full day out in winter, even the sunny ones like today. The heavy dew means nothing can be left out overnight and the grass is wet till around 10am, not the best for evaporation!

My plan is a 2 or 3 sided room/shed with polycarbonate roofing, something like 2.8 x 3.5m, longer side facing north, walls on the south and west, where the rain comes from, but ideally a few windows in there too for more breeze. We get sideways rain up to 6 feet high on the back verandah door even with the roof over it so no wall isn't an option.  

I want to go a bit fancy and have a roof high enough that raising the clothes with a winch leaves me a useable work space for also drying herbs and dyeing and so on. Plus flyscreens on the north side. Standard shed roof tilted north, decent angle, gutter on the south and tank behind. Option then for hand washing clothes and fleece in my little workspace.

Easy cheap option is a cover on a hills hoist, but that means buying one to start with, since it sounds like you don't have one. But a simple 4 posts and polycarb roofed space sized for the 10m2 rule and standard roofing sheets would be fairly cheap too. You could always build it with the option to add a wall or two later if you need it.

Our patio had a pergola with climbers, we've covered half with polycarb and if it wasn't for the southerly winds it'd be great for washing.

We're in the Hunter Valley, so we're the opposite of you - cool dryish winters and warm/hot wettish summers.  Outside drying works well in Spring and Autumn but generally touch and go in Winter and Summer.  I have had similar ideas for a covered "drying room" so that we can reliably dry clothes all year round.  To partly solve the wet wind problem, I thought of using louvered windows.  You may be able to get some secondhand if you're lucky...I imagine they would be unpopular now as they don't seal the outside out and the inside in as seems to be the craze with energy efficient homes these days.

Another alternative might be to use shade cloth.  It would cut down the wind though, but it would stop the worst of the rain blowing in.

Love to see what you end up creating :)

I just had a thought about getting around the 10m rule... What if you put it on wheels? I don't know how flat your garden is so may not be practical but this is often used to circumvent regulations for permanent buildings. 10m would be a fairly small caravan these days!  This might allow you to change the orientation to best suit the wind.

It seems to me, having experimented with different clothes hanging options that the air circulation is more important than heat. I can dry things fairly quickly in the winter especially if the air is moving

Although most days I hang things on the covered part of the deck.

I have a laundry spinner. It's electric. But it does extract a lot of water. I use it before I put things in a dryer or hang outside. Less time in drier and it seems like less wrinkles in the hung up clothes. It's like the wind irons them. And it seems things dry pretty quick outside.

maybe not a help to the situation, but hopefully give someone some ideas....

i've used the shower in my rv to hang clothes on a rainy day when they could not be hung outside.  rigging a rod inside the shower stall and i was good to go.  i placed a fan pointed upward.. my shower has a seat.  it basically became a drying closet.  lint needed to be cleaned up after.  the fan was needed to move the air.  it was too humid & otherwise, the clothes would mildew and then need to be rewashed.

fans are easy enough to run off solar.  it doesn't take much, moving air is most important. (just saying)

i have often thought of this type of "dryer" :

(extremely long link.. but i couldn't figure a way to post picture.. sorry)

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Panda-11-cu-ft-Blue-Electric-Portable-Ventless-Cloth-Laundry-Dryer-Folding-Drying-Machine-with-Heater-PAN82PD/313622724?mtc=Shopping-VF-F_D29A-B-D29A-29_8_LAUNDRY-Multi-NA-Feed-PLA-2153902-WF-MajorAppl&cm_mmc=Shopping-VF-F_D29A-B-D29A-29_8_LAUNDRY-Multi-NA-Feed-PLA-2153902-WF-MajorAppl-71700000034368214-58700003951482541-92700032005039949&msclkid=7febe27f2bbc1b9ddd43829e08b0673d&gclid=7febe27f2bbc1b9ddd43829e08b0673d&gclsrc=3p.ds

That could be very cool, having a laundry building!  No more rain-wet laundry!   Of course, that situation reminds me of living in Alaska, where it was common to hang clothes on the outside line to “freeze dry”—wet cloth would freeze solid, & ice particles would flake off as those got vigorously shaken/snapped…there’d still be a bit of damp, so finish-drying was indoors where the wood stove helped.
I wouldn’t worry about the roof panels..the smoke-color polycarbonate panels last a nice long time, & do a decent job of limiting UV, while the smoke color helps make the light through the panels less painful to the eyes.  
But even if it didn’t, how would UV thru the solar roof be different from hanging them in full sun on the line, regarding fading clothes from UV?  
If you are concerned about fading, some of the opaque corrugated greenhouse panels, like the white or creme colored, would do the job of letting light in, concentrating solar heat in there. Those are usually fiberglass. No idea how long those last, these days, but they used to last several decades.  We have a couple smoke polycarbonate panels on a cabin roof, that are about 30 years old now… I was concerned about them possibly cracking & leaking from age, but they haven’t yet.  My DH stuffed bubble packing up under those, between rafters, for insulation, to redirect any leaks out over the top of the wall edges…probably, only way those might leak anytime soon, is if a falling tree limb poked through or cracked them.
What if you made a peaked roof, so one side faces south, one side faces north, both covered in the polycarbonate, & both sides would catch a good amount of light for the laundry, you’d get optimal solar into there, no matter the season.   There could be racks for herb & food drying in there, too.
Some have done tiny house roofs using polycarbonate, on both inside & outside of the rafters, with recycled bubble-pack stuffed between as a translucent insulation, laced with tiny LED fairy lights on a remote control, just for fun (those can be got as solar operated; only the rechargeable batteries need changed every few years.  
A whole roof of polycarbonate panels brings significant heat into the area under the roof of it…only part of our 35’x10’ patio, maybe about half?…has those; the rest of the roof is brown metal roofing panels.  But even with the sides all open, it routinely gets rather warm in that area…easily 10 degrees warmer, and often more.
We plan to build some passive solar heat tubes to fit between the rafters under those panels, to help heat the house in winter, & to preheat water for the hot water heater.
That kind of heat helps dry wet clothes, herbs, food drying, etc.
Some have made an old fashioned drier-box or closet, that has an air inlet in its floor, & an outlet on the upper side, with a box fan inside, mounted either blowing down from the upper vent, or, blowing up from the intake vent in the floor of that box. Clothes get hung or spread on wire racks for the air to blow through, speeding dry-time, & fluffing them.   The box fan can run on solar power, draws only about 45 watts, & can be plugged into a manual timer (the kind that has pins to pull to set use-time).
Would love to see pictures when you get it done 🙂

Sorry…no idea why this posted twice…& I didn’t know how to delete the excess comment.

I love the idea of putting it on wheels, however it presents a couple major problems. The biggest is that it will be top heavy by nature, and the clothes will act like sails while drying making it even more likely to tip if not properly anchored. You could make sure there is enough weight at the bottom to keep it from being top heavy with the clothes on it, but then it could get quite heavy. Though there are often cheap, heavy duty tires to deal with just that. You will also want to get wheels that would work well on whatever sort of ground it will be on and can lock so as to keep it from going all over the place.

I also agree with the air circulation being key. Good luck!

I mostly dry my clothes inside now because I am renting and the outside clothes line gets visited by birds so often it is pointless using it for anything but to collect free compost by putting plants underneath it. (I really could not deal with the frustration any longer of going to get my clean clothes and finding them all covered in bird droppings.)

I think there have already been plenty of good ideas and comments posted here.  Just want to throw my own voice behind a couple of viewpoints that have been expressed...

Definitely concur that to dry clothes - or to dry anything, for that matter - one needs air circulation and lots of it.  Not heat.  Heat is a nice addition, but not strictly necessary.

Don't over-engineer your solution.  Several people have sketched out the idea of a simple, open-sided or mostly-open-sided shed with a roof to keep off the rain while natural air circulation does all the work for you.  I think creating such a shed over a drying rack would be simpler than trying to engineer a long thin roof over the entire length of your existing clothes line.  Perhaps consider one of those carrousel-style clothes lines that spin around a central pole.  That would be compact enough to fit under a roof and more convenient to load/unload than a rack.

I think someone floated the idea of making your roof out of clear plastic paneling so that your clothes would receive (most of) the benefit of direct sunlight while simultaneously being rain sheltered.  Sounds like this has a lot of potential.

Good luck, and be sure to post pictures or a description of what you finally construct!