BLACK+DECKER 63099 3-Tier Heated Clothes Airer Aluminium, Cool Grey, 140cm x 73cm x 68cm

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I found the Dry:Soon took around four to five hours to dry lighter materials; and closer to 10-12 for heavier jumpers and the like. In the world of heated clothes airers, that’s really pretty good – the cover certainly does its job.

We found that there wasn’t a lot of difference between the heated airers when it came to their energy consumption, with the models we tested using between 0.09 kilowatt hours (kWh) and 0.91 kWh – that’s between two and 23 pence of electricity an hour. It’s effectively a fan on detachable tripod feet with a pole, at the top of which there are six spokes designed to hold up to 12 hangers of spin-dried or well-wrung damp clothing (up to 10kg). It’s particularly useful for shirts and blouses, since being able to hang T-shirts in this way means they dry straight with minimal creases, meaning less ironing. But it’s less useful for drying, say, towels. Reviewer Laura Cooke lives in a four-bedroom house in Sussex with her husband and two kids, aged four and six. Easy to use, it arrives assembled, simply fold out, plug in and switch on. Ideal for winter months as a perfect alternative to outdoor drying. Features and Benefits This fan-powered heated clothes airer circulates warm air within its zip-up cover to dry washing in super fast times.Running at 300w, it costs 15p an hour to use at current prices. It’s tall enough for hanging long items like trousers and towels, and the adaptable rungs mean you can lay up to six jumpers flat for speedy drying. My colleague Debora Robertson swears by it as the best way of drying bras and Sally Hughes of laundry experts Kair recommends it to make delicates last longer. The longer they take to dry items, the more they’ll ultimately end up costing, but even if you use them to start the drying process, they should make a noticeable difference to your laundry pile.

While heated airers use less electricity per hour than a tumble dryer, they take longer to dry the clothes. So, if you're drying big loads regularly, it will cost you more to run a heated airer annually than a tumble dryer. There are two main types of heated clothes airer: heated bar clothes airers and drying pods. Both work very differently. We took each airer's capacity into account to also calculate the cost of drying a large cotton load. Drying pods are essentially big hair dryers for clothes, using a fan and heating element to blow hot air through the clothes hanging inside a pod. Closely resembling traditional clothes horses, heated clothes airers have heating elements within their rails to warm your washing and speed up the drying process.Looking ahead over the next few months, we're bound to see a lot of one thing: rain. The good ol' British weather never fails us, particularly during the colder seasons, which can make getting your washing dry a bit of a tough job. Like most things in life, it depends. In this case: on the amount of clothes you need to dry and how fast you want them to dry. When winter comes around and hanging your clothes outside to dry is no longer an option, the best heated clothes airers can be a laundry lifesaver. Taking a simple concept that’s been around for centuries and adding a mains-powered heating element is a simple solution to an evergreen problem, and it can potentially save you money on your energy bills to boot.