I go back and forth on the notion of wool dryer balls. On the one hand, my inner 10-year-old thinks it’s fun to say, and it’s certainly an environmentally-friendly option and I know a lot of people who swear by them. On the other hand, I keep thinking I’ll end up losing them or I’ll miss the bit of fresh scent I get from a dryer sheet. So I waffle.
Right now, this 6-pack of XL wool dryer balls at Amazon is marked at $18.95, but coupon code SMART900 takes another $7 off, which means if you have Prime, you’re getting them for $11.95 shipped. They supposedly soften/fluff your clothes and reduce static just as well as dryer sheets, only they last forever (okay, maybe not forever, but a long time). At this price, I may give ’em a try.
We’ve used some alpaca-wool balls for five years now, and we absolutely love them. We’re scent-free, so that doesn’t matter to us, but they work like a charm. That said, you can put essential oils on them, so you could get your laundry to smell like whatever you want. (We used to do orange essential oil, but I’m okay with scentless laundry and not buying another product for that.)
We always lived in apartments that have pay dryers, and we have noticed that they work better and we rarely have to do two cycles now that we have them. (Pay dryers around here are notorious for being crappy and requiring too many cycles.) The alpaca-wool balls that we have are huge. They are bigger than any we’ve seen elsewhere, which was why we went with that shop.
We are members of MightyFix and just received some of their dryer balls a month or two ago, and we just tossed those right in with our other ones. We haven’t lost any, even with having to run down the hall or down the sidewalk (in our current townhouse) to do laundry, but we keep them in the giant organza bag that our alpaca-wool balls came in. (We got ours from Big Horn Mountain Alpacas. They have a website that they sell on, but they also sell the dryer balls on Etsy, if you prefer that site.)
Ummmmm…as you can tell, I’m a big fan of our dryer balls!