This Karl Miller Amish-made wooden arch clothes dryer is the off-grid alternative to a $700 electric dryer — and outperforms one for line-drying air quality. Forty-nine linear feet of 1/2-inch hardwood dowel give enough capacity to dry a full family wash load at once: shirts on the upper rungs, pants on the middle, towels on the bottom, with room left for socks and small items. Set up indoors, it dries laundry overnight without using a single watt of electricity.
Upright dimensions are 52 inches tall, 30-1/2 inches wide, and 57-1/2 inches long — the footprint of a typical loveseat. When wash day is done, the dryer folds flat to 19 inches deep by 19 inches tall and 29 inches long, sliding behind a door or into a utility closet for the rest of the week. At 18-1/2 lb assembled it’s heavy enough to stay put under a full load but light enough for one person to set up and break down.
Built by Amish woodworkers from American hardwood for Karl Miller, this is the model homesteaders, off-grid families, apartment dwellers who can’t run a vented dryer, and energy-conscious households have used for decades. Line-dried laundry holds fabric integrity longer than tumble-dried, smells cleaner without artificial fragrance, and saves the household several hundred dollars a year in electric or gas costs. Genuine American Amish craftsmanship at the price of one season of dryer energy bills.
