Laundry With Nowhere to Dry It

Drying a load indoors releases litres of water into your flat. Everything else on this page follows from that. The clothes dry when that water leaves the room, so the problem is ventilation and extraction — not warmth.

A heated airer in a sealed room dries the clothes and wets the walls. The same airer with a window open, or with a dehumidifier running, dries the clothes and removes the water.

A note on this guide: this rests on how evaporation and humidity behave in a closed room and on manufacturers' stated extraction figures, not on loads dried and weighed here. See how we test.

The problem, as it appears

A flat with no outside space, no room for a tumble dryer, and a washing machine that produces more laundry than the flat can absorb.

The airer goes up in the living room or the bedroom, the clothes take two days, everything smells faintly of damp, and by February there is black mould in the corner of an external wall behind the wardrobe.

Why the obvious fix disappoints

The obvious fix is more heat — turn the radiator up, drape things over it, close the door to keep the warmth in.

It disappoints because warm air that is already saturated dries nothing. Evaporation stops when the air cannot hold more moisture, and a closed warm room reaches that point quickly.

Worse, the moisture does not stay in the air. It condenses on the coldest surface available, which in a flat is an external wall or a window reveal — usually behind furniture, where it is discovered late and is not covered by anyone's idea of fair wear.

The bathroom seems like the obvious room and is usually the worst one: already humid, cold-surfaced, and dependent on an extractor that in most rented flats does not run long enough to matter.

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What actually matters

1. Getting the water out of the clothes before they go up

An extra spin cycle removes water mechanically that would otherwise have to be evaporated. It costs a few pence and it is the highest-value change on this page.

2. Getting the water out of the room

Either it leaves through a window, or something removes it. Those are the options. A closed room with an airer in it is a room where the water goes into the plaster.

3. Getting the floor back

In a small flat the airer occupies the living space for two days per load, which is the cost people actually feel. Anything that folds flat or shortens the drying time is buying back the room.

The options, and who each suits

A wall-mounted rack that folds flat

The space answer. Up for the load, flat against the wall afterwards. It needs fixings into something solid, so it is for owners or for tenants with permission.

A dehumidifier

The one that addresses the actual problem. It removes the water rather than relocating it, and for the same electricity it generally dries faster than a heater because it attacks the limiting factor.

It also solves the damp-corner problem you were about to have.

A heated airer

For speed, and best used with the door closed and a dehumidifier running — the two together turn two days into an evening.

Alone in a sealed room, it accelerates the process of putting water into your walls.

Moisture traps

For a wardrobe, a cupboard or a caravan they are genuinely useful. Against a wet load of washing they are not the right order of magnitude, and buying them for that job is the most common misunderstanding here.

The mistake to avoid

Closing the door and turning the heating up. It is the intuitive move and it converts a drying problem into a mould problem, on a timescale slow enough that the two are never connected.

The tell is condensation on the inside of the windows in the morning. If that is happening while laundry is drying, the water is not leaving — it is being deposited, and the wall behind the wardrobe is getting the share you cannot see.

The related failure, in cupboards rather than rooms, is in storing things in a damp cupboard. And if the flat is cold enough that you are reluctant to open a window at all, that is worth fixing first — draught-proofing a rented flat covers where the cold is actually coming from.