If you aren’t lucky enough to own a tumble dryer, you’ll know that drying your laundry isn’t always easy. Hanging it up outside is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to do this, but the UK weather sadly doesn’t always cooperate.
So there’s often nothing you can do except hang it up inside. But this can take days, especially when the weather is chilly, and it can end up with an unpleasant damp and musty smell. However, consumer experts at Which? have identified a genius method of drying your laundry ‘twice as fast’ inside, and it’s cheaper than using the tumble dryer too.
The pros have hailed the humble dehumidifier as a quick, easy and cheap way to dry your laundry fast, which you’ve probably already heard of doing. However, there’s a certain way that this must be done to get the best results.
To prove how effective this trick was, the experts carried out an experiment with two identical loads of laundry, laying them out to dry on two clothes racks.
And they said it’s crucial to place the dehumidifier either underneath the clothes, or right next to it, for optimal drying.
They left the other rack of clothes to dry without a dehumidifier and the verdict was clear. In a TikTok video, they said: “Using a dehumidifier cut drying time by nearly half. It also sucked up around two litres of water from the air, which would really help to prevent mould.”
The cost of running your dehumidifier will depend on its capacity and size, but according to the experts at Ideal Home, there’s a clear winner when it comes to affordability.
They say that you can generally expect a 9kg vented tumble dryer to set you back over £1 per cycle, which will amount to over £100 per year on average.
Explaining in more detail, they said: “This is very different to how much it costs to run a dehumidifier. Again, this varies on a dehumidifier-by-dehumidifier basis. Generally, though, a 20L dehumidifier will cost around 15p an hour to run.”
