This was triggered by someone looking for how to tag this and why it is not included in iD presets. Fixing clearly confusing name would be, I think, prerequisite to support it.
As fas as I’m aware the fanciest clothes driers on the market today essentially re-circulate air between the drum of clothes and a dehumidifier until the clothes are dry (heat pump dryers). The heat introduced in this process could be considered a byproduct of the process instead of being the main drying method. Should we mark them as being not being dryers? Maybe this isn’t a good example.
Near the other end of technological developments in drying clothes it was once very common to use a hand cranked mangle (wringer) to get the bulk of the water out of clothed before hanging them up to finish drying. These didn’t use heat to dry at all, should we exclude remaining examples of these from the clothes_dryer tag? (Other than the industrial ones used for ironing, that’s a separate debate.)
I’m not really opposed to changing clothes_dryer to something else, but I don’t think heat’s a good argument.
From a quick internet search it seems that British retailers are calling the ‘backwards umbrella’ type of washing line contraption either a washing line or airer depending on the brand.
The types with stiff wires or rods to hold clothes seem to be being sold almost exclusively as airers, as are the frames that you have on pulleys hanging from the ceiling. Calling a single line an airer would be weird to me though.
If we’re in need of a bright line test between clotheslines and drying machines, may I suggest that clotheslines are more difficult to cover in artificial intelligence pixie dust?
I have no idea how to tag clothes dryers, this thread is about clothes lines.
Though using amenity=clothes_dryer for clothes dryers has problem of being skunked and used for clothes lines. Maybe use actually_clothes_dryer=yes?
Do you have a better idea how to distinguish actual clothes dryers (accessible to public or at least customers) from clothes lines using confused tag, to mark them as reviewed?
Or have a new tag them? Which one?
no idea how to tag such machine (AFAIK mangle is term also for machine to iron large objects such as tablecloth)
not sure in what sense heat was used as an argument by me?
No. I agree with you, this is a clothes line or washing line, not anything with “dryer” in the name. I’m not sure which of clothes line or clothesline or washing line is more common, or whether there is a preference for one of those by region.
While I would never rely blindly on wikipedia, in this case the introductory text matches my understanding of these terms in English:
=rack is a rack, not “line” as in wires. Doesn’t fit =clothes_line. The example should be clarified about how it’s illustrating the thing on the left. File:Bucato steso al sole.jpg - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Wiki has a interesting article title I didn’t know about. But =rack might be replaceable by =frame to make it absolutely clear it’s not about “racks” with wires between them… Clothes horse - Wikipedia
