Should you ever use air, line your clothes in direct sunlight or even opt for a machine dryer? Here’s everything you need to know about air drying.
If you treat your fabric with kindness, it will last longer than you can ever imagine. And one of the best ways to do this is to air-dry your clothes properly.
In this blog, post we explain how to air-dry your clothes without any side effects.
What Is Air-Drying?
Air-drying is a method that makes fabrics dry through contact with unheated air. The fabric is dried to such a degree that no further moisture is given up on exposure to air.
How To Air-Dry Your Clothes Without A Dryer
It’s simple! You can just dry them manually. There are several ways to do this including using an outdoor clothes-line, an indoor clothes-line or a clothes drying rack.
Agree with us, it is always preferable to practice and start with the gentlest method, and then build up to more extreme methods.
This method of caring for your clothes takes far less of a toll on fabrics than machine drying, not to talk about its energy efficiency.
Benefits Of Air-Drying Your Clothes
Although this method might seem old, it’s still GOATed! It brings different comfort and natural benefits. Here are amazing benefits of air-drying your clothes.
- Affordability and Energy
In your home, the dryer is the other most energy-intensive appliance, runner-up after the refrigerator. With this, you are lowering your carbon footprint by using the Air-drying method even if you don’t ‘pay’ for laundry.
- It is Much Gentler
To Air-Dry your clothes is a gentler technique compared to the tumbling technique.
You can decide to lay your clothes on a rack or hang them up. Whatever the choice, this technique is much gentler than machine drying, that uses abrasive tumbling action. Over time, the process will wear down and even warp the fabric.
- Air-Dry Resists Static Cling
When you Air-Dry your clothes, It prevents static cling.
This is another set of workload encountered by machine users. You know when you feel your load is done, but you have to separate every single shirt like onions? It’s called static cling.
Although, air-drying solves this issue, the tumbling action from dryers causes clothes to build up an electrostatic charge that makes the clothes cling to the other clothes.
- It Reduces Wrinkles
Using a dryer and under heat, the chemical bonds in fibers become relaxed to move around. The structure can easily form wrinkles during the cool-down.
Mind you, if your dryer load contains both heavy and lightweight fabrics, then creases are also more likely to be formed. With this method, your fabrics are left to hang and dry naturally.
- It Prevents Unwanted Shrinkage
Clothes mostly shrink in the dryer due to heat causing fibers to retreat to their relaxed state. Also, this same heat can melt from a great point and degrade spandex, making the clothes less stretchy over time.
- Air-dry Preserves The Colour Of The Clothes
You are preserving your clothes’s color when you Air-Dry them. This technique is one of the great way to preserve the color of your clothes.
Tumble drying can be an abrasive process and fabrics can easily crock. The transfer of color when a fabric is subjected to abrasion is crooked.
Meanwhile, at the molecular level, heat can also cause some dyes to lose their attraction to the fiber, or degrade the dye particles themselves.
To air-dry your clothes are natural processes that are of no doubt better for your clothes in the long run.
How To Air-Dry Your Clothes
To effectively enjoy this beautiful process of air-drying your clothes, you must ensure you know to follow these steps.
- Spread clothes on a rod or lay them flat on a drying rack when drying the clothes inside the home.
- Separate clothes to allow air circulation and faster drying.
- You can place the clothes near a fan to hasten things up.
- Stretchy clothes like sweaters should be laid flat on a drying rack to help retain their shapes. Don’t forget to turn them at least once to allow them to dry evenly.
- Do well to hang fleece clothes from a rod to dry.
- Reshape all foam or batting in bra cups before draping bras over a clothing rack to dry.
- Make sure you use clothespins if the garments seem in danger of slipping off.
- Pin panties to hangers by the waistbands, or hang them over a drying rack to dry.
What Are The Tools Necessary to Air-Dry Your Clothes
For this technique, you must have your equipment or at least a choice of equipment to use. Below are common air equipment used for air-drying clothes.
- Indoor And Outdoor Drying Rack
Drying racks are extremely important for this particular method. They can be portable and are easily installed indoors or outdoors when the need arises. The installment and position depend on the season and your preference. All that is required is some space where the racks can be installed.
- Wooden Clothespins
Wooden Clothespins are made from high-quality wooden material that can hold up to 10 pounds on each clip. This helps save dryer energy and keeps your clothing lasting longer and looking great by using this drying technique.
- Plastic Clothes Peg.
Plastic clothes peg is used as a fastener to hang up clothes for drying, usually on a clothesline. It’s even interesting that it comes in many different designs and colours.
Effect Of Air Drying Your Clothes
Although air-drying clothes has lots of benefits, there are a few bad effects they have on clothes.
There’s always an extra cost of purchasing racks to air dry your clothes. You also have to install, maintain, and keep clotheslines to ensure there is space to spread your clothes.
Also, there’s a need for you to depend on the weather for outdoor drying, either rain, harsh sun, or more.
Indoor drying comes with some issues like moisture issues and it takes a longer time for it to dry.
Clothes that are air-dried when wet can look untidy and messy, especially if these clothes are big.
Note, that when these clothes are outside, sunshine can cause a bright-coloured cloth to fade or bleach out.
Apart from the fact that kids can sometimes stain these clothes, clothes can sometimes be stained by bird poop and several other factors.
Air-Dry Vs. Dryer
Air-drying your clothes is more efficient and effective though it comes with a lot of effort and fewer clothes.
With all the pros of air-drying, compared to a dryer there are still some ways the air-dry method is lagging.
The dryer allows busy people to do a load of laundry with a lot less effort. Unlike a Air-Drying, you can fill the dryer with a larger amount of clothes.
Plus, a dryer is a reliable constant especially when weather or life gets erratic and unexpected things happen.
Dryers also have some disadvantages like, the heat and friction from the dryer cause great damage to clothes.
If you use a dryer for the wrong piece of clothing it leads to shrinking, fading, and changes in fits of the clothes.
When it comes to the dryer, there are always maintenance issues if faulty there’s always a larger problem.
Pro tips: Make sure you read the care label instructions to prevent the damaging of your clothes. Delicates, knits, and nets should be air-dried separately.
Should I Air-Dry My Clothes Inside or Outside?
You have several choices to choose from, we know you are curious about the best space to air-dry your clothes. Let us help you with that.
- Air-dry your clothes outside
Air-drying your clothes outside makes your clothes refreshing and clean. To enjoy outside air-dry follow these tips. Always avoid spreading black or bright-coloured clothes directly to the sun and make sure your white is dry directly in the sun.
- Air-dry your clothes Inside
Air-drying inside is convenient and comfortable, you don’t even have to track the weather. Here are a few tips to follow before spreading your clothes inside.
Use a coat hanger to save space, give your clothes a thorough shake to reduce wrinkles, and don’t dry clothes directly on the radiator as it will add additional moisture to the air.
What’s the best choice? Based on what you’ve known. Both have their pros and cons but one prominent thing is that air drying your clothes is better than a machine dryer.
Why Do My Clothes Smell After Air Drying?
Air-drying is no doubt a great option because it saves the clothes from a lot of damage, and electricity.
Air-drying your clothes comes with great features, but still has some little issues to look out for.
One of the most common complaints of the time about air-dry is the bad smell. Once you know the cause of the bad smell, you can now go on smelling those nice scents after washing.
Firstly, maybe the clothing is still dirty, if the cloth is still dirty it would definitely smell or the clothes are not suitable for air-drying.
Your clothes can also smell after air drying because the weather might be too humid, and mould or mildew.
Pro Tips; Air-drying inside the home can also cause your clothes to smell, so avoid air-drying your clothes inside or place the rack in a well-ventilated space.
Conclusion
With this Air-Dry technique, you don’t need to own a dryer, which means you won’t need to spend money on electricity to power it.
Clothes that are dried outside also smell great without using any chemical dryer sheets.
