How To Set Up A Clothesline
A clothesline is the cheapest and quickest thing to do to be able to dry clothing when you are living off grid. Having a clothesline is great even if you live in a traditional on the grid home. If your electricity ever goes out for an extended period of time, you might want or need to do some laundry by hand. You also might want to have a clothesline to cut down on your electricity bill. Either way, setting up a clothesline is easy and inexpensive and everyone should have one.
We went the extra mile to have a pulley clothesline and it’s pretty simple to set up. The pulley system allows you to stand in one place while attaching your clothing to the line and move the clothesline just by pulling it, rather than walking along the line and dragging your basket of clothing along with you each step.
To set a clothesline up the way we did, you will need: (These are affiliate links.)
Drill bit
Two trees about 25 ft. apart
Because we live in the woods, it was not hard to find two trees that were alive, about 25-30 ft. apart from each other, and in a location near our laundry area. If you don’t have this, you can attach one end of the line to a building or porch and install a pole in the ground on the other side. We originally bought all the components for our system individually so we ended up buying some pretty heavy duty hooks to go into the trees. If you’d rather have something more heavy duty than what comes in the kit, you can upgrade your hooks. Either way, you will need a drill bit that is a little smaller than the threaded part of the hooks. Use it to drill a hole in the trees where you want the hooks to be.
The hooks will be pretty tight going in so using something like a screwdriver can help give you more leverage.
Make sure the hooks are pretty high up on the trees as the line will sag down the second you hang clothes on it. Our hooks are about 6 feet off the ground but I wish we had put them up maybe 6 inches higher. Of course, you want to be able to reach the line easily, so you may have to play around with the height depending on your height and how far apart the trees are.
Because we bought such huge hooks, the pulleys would not fit over them. We ended up adding a carabiner to attach the two. If you buy the kit, this shouldn’t be a problem. But if you do run into the same problem we did and need to use a carabiner, the hooks end up needing to be parallel to the ground for everything to sit right.
Next you run the rope through the pulleys on both sides. The ends should come together on the bottom. Tie one end of the rope to the winch and then run the other end of the rope through the winch hole and pull until it is tight. You will have to lift the middle piece of metal while pulling the rope through. This should make sense when you have the winch in hand.
Now your clothesline is ready to use! These separators are VERY important to making sure your line works well while also keeping your clothing from touching the ground. If you don’t use them, the bottom rope will sag further and further with every piece of clothing you add. I like to add one of these every 3 pieces of clothing or so to keep the line tight, but you can play around with it to see how often you like to use them. You also need to make sure you place them where the wheel is on the top line and the hook is on the bottom. This is the only way it will work as it is supposed to.
As far as clothespins go, we’ve only used the plain wood ones and it has worked great for us. I do feel like you eventually figure out a technique for hanging your clothes after a while. For example, I always fold over a small portion of whatever I’m hanging over the rope an then add a clothespin to that small part. If the clothing is too thick for that then I’ll just do it to one side of the clothing, i.e. sweatpants. I always use clothespins liberally adding as many as 5 for heavy pants and sweaters. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
