During the winter, wet and cold conditions usually force us to dry our clothes indoors. But the accumulation of moisture and excess damp might cause mold growth and damage to your soft materials. While a tumble drier can be a great option to avoid issues, not every household can afford these expensive and space-consuming devices.
Fortunately, there is a much simpler and more affordable way to dry your clothes quickly indoors. All you need to prepare is a good dehumidifier. Let’s see how it works.
What Is A Dehumidifier?
A dehumidifier is an electrical appliance that helps reduce and maintain the humidity level in the air, typically for comfort, health reasons or to prevent mildew and odour. It can be used for industrial, commercial, and household applications.
A dehumidifier generally works by extracting moisture from the air in your room through a vent and then passing it over metal coils. When the air contacts the cold coils, the water will condense and form droplets that are drained away or fall off into a bucket.
Does A Dehumidifier Speed Up Your Drying Process?
The answer is yes. Indeed, a dehumidifier can considerably cut the amount of time you need to dry your clothes. By taking in excess moisture in the air, it helps prevent any damp or mold from building up inside your home. This is extremely important because the extended use of clothes horse or airer to dry wet washing indoors might result in extra moisture.
In addition to combating excess moisture, a dehumidifier also draws wetness from your clothes and make them dry faster. A few advanced models even come with a “boost” button that enables them to run harder, thus accelerating the process of drying your wet laundry.
How Do You Dry Clothes With A Dehumidifier?
It is quite straightforward to dry your clothes indoors with a dehumidifier. If you have a portable machine, this can even simpler since you would move it to wherever you hang your wet washing.
As a rule of thumb, you should not place your wet clothes in a room with a lot of soft furnishings, even with a dehumidifier. Excess moistures and damp might damage soft materials and cost you a lot of money for replacing. Thus, it is not recommended to dry in your bedroom or living room.
A useful tip to ensure that your dehumidifier is running as efficiently as possible and might dry out your wet washing quickly is to place it in a quite small area. In most case, this will depend on the capacity of your dehumidifier.
For example, if your unit can work up to 1,200 square feet, and you put it in a space that is 550 square feet, then it might be working efficiently and draw more moist air out of your wet clothes faster.
Also, keep in mind to seal off the space that you are using to dry clothes. Close any windows and doors to keep your dehumidifier from working excessively. By doing this, it will only dehumidify the air in your room instead of extracting the air outside.
Do You Need To Have A Water Reservoir Or A Bucket?
Most portable dehumidifiers come with a bucket that can collect and hold a quite large amount of water. However, if you are using it to draw moisture from your wet laundry, this reservoir is relatively small and might fill up quickly. Thus, make sure to consider the bucket size when you are choosing a dehumidifier for this purpose.
If you are living in an area that is rainy or snowy most of the time, for example, it totally makes sense to choose a unit with a large-sized water reservoir. Also, an automatic shut-off function is helpful to avoid leaking when the bucket gets filled. Another option is to buy a model that is attached with a draining hose to drain the water continuously.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, it is relatively straightforward to dry your wet clothes indoors using a small dehumidifier. Not only does it will save you a lot of energy and time, but this can also prevent your washing from getting bad odours or mildew due to excess moisture. Just make sure to follow all of our tips above to let your unit work efficiently.
