It could be used outdoors, but I keep mine inside. I discovered, after a few tries, that I'm one of apparently not many people that does not like the smell of sun-dried clothes at all. I decided to try using the rack indoors and it works fine. I put it in the living room with the ceiling fan on and jeans dry in a day.They would dry somewhat faster outside, but something about the drying/sun baking/UV saturation process leaves them smelling to me like they do when they need to go into the laundry hamper, not when they are ready to be put back in the closet. Drying indoors does not lead to the same issues. Up north in the winter or when it's raining drying indoors makes more sense even for those who like drying outside.
To dry the clothes, I space them out as shown (the rack in the picture has seven pairs of jeans, with room for a couple more without too much trouble) and flip them a few times as they dry to hasten the process.
Some things will be wrinkled when air-dried. For jeans it doesn't matter as much, but for shirts it'd be more obvious. One thing that would probably be better for shirts is putting them on a hanger with a single horizontal bar--I wouldn't necessarily want to do that with this rack because that would be putting a lot of point stress on the horizontal bars and it might cause problems.
The texture of line-dried clothes is not as soft as those that are tumble-dried. Jeans are noticeably more stiff at first, but they soon loosen up when wearing them. For towels the difference is even more dramatic. Line- or rack-dried towels are not only stiffer; the pile is clumped together and the towels don't fluff up at all. In the picture, the bottom two towels were tumble-dried and the four on top were rack-dried. In practice, the rack-dried towels work okay, but tumbled towels are definitely superior in ways that are more apparent than when considering jeans dried the two ways. I haven't air-dried towels enough times to know if they'll become matted permanently by doing this or not.So the obvious question is: why do this? There are a couple of reasons. If you don't have a clothes dryer, there's an obvious need. Even if you do, it can make sense to air-dry at least some clothes. Jeans take a long time in the dryer. I often pull most or all of them out of a load of dark-colored clothes so that the load that goes into the dryer finishes faster. That cuts electricity usage somewhat (although if the energy savings are being used to justify the cost of a rack it'll take a while). A big load of towels can take a while, too. In the winter, most houses have issues with low humidity (and out west, it can be a problem year-round). If it is relatively dry inside, the clothes will air-dry faster and help humidify the room slightly while doing so.
It may be worth thinking about.
