Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Vertical clothes air dryer

This structure was originally designed last year to support pumpkin vines. There are no vines this year so I was thinking of putting the structure to a new use.

With temperature crossing 90 F it makes perfect sense to use this structure for clothes drying. It is a nice compact structure with
Length = 2 feet; Width = 2 feet and 6.5 feet high.

There are eight 2 feet horizontal bars for hangers. That is an equivalent of 16 feet length for hangers. It can hang 32 hangers with mixed sized clothes. That's about a load of laundry.

A 5000 Watt dryer running for an hour consumer 5 kWh of electricity. If 1 kWh of electricity costs $0.10 then 5 kWh will cost $0.50 per load. 100 loads per year is $50.00 of electricity savings per year. This is a conservative number but one can save anywhere from $40 to $60 per year just by air drying laundry. This is post tax money :)

This puppy is made out of 3/4" PVC water pipes and PVC joints. This structure can be easily disassembled any time and stowed away.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

First Tomato of the season!

48 hours after pruning and I see the first tomato of the season. It is very exciting. Pruning definitely helped but I don't want to send the wrong message that pruning results in tomatoes.

Tomato Plant in pot


Tomato Plant in pot
Originally uploaded by sumantamandal
I went a little crazy with pruning after reading tomato pruning tips from Fine Gardening
http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/pruning-tomatoes.aspx

Pruning was done on Monday 06/22/2009