Drying clothes cheaply in a UK winter

Once the line outside stops being useful, a UK household still has to get washing dry. The usual indoor options are a heated airer, a tumble dryer, or a dehumidifier in a shut room with a normal airer. They do not use the same amount of electricity, and the October–December 2026 gap between 7.6p and 26.32p makes the timing matter as much as the appliance.

This page costs three stated assumptions. It does not claim those watt-hours are what every load will use. Wet towels and a small synthetic wash are different jobs. Use the figures to see the method, then change the rates on the homepage calculator.

Heated airer

Lakeland lists the Dry:Soon Mini 3-tier at 198W. Leave it on for the six cheap hours and the electricity is 0.198 kW × 6 h = 1.188 kWh. At 7.6p/kWh that is 9.0p. At 26.32p/kWh it is 31.3p. The difference for that one session is about 22p. The airer only warms the bars. If the room is cold and shut, the moisture still has to go somewhere, which is why people pair it with ventilation or a dehumidifier rather than treating 9p as the whole cost of a dry house.

Heat-pump tumble dryer

The laundry tab uses 1.4 kWh for a heat-pump cycle. 1.4 × 7.6p = 10.6p. 1.4 × 26.32p = 36.8p. A condenser example of 3.1 kWh is 23.6p off-peak and 81.6p at the cap rate. On those figures the heat-pump cycle costs less than the condenser cycle at either rate, and the off-peak heat-pump cycle is close to the six-hour heated airer.

Which? publishes its own annual running costs for dryers it tracks, based on three cotton loads a week at the October 2026 cap of 26.32p/kWh. On that page the heat-pump average is £54.32 a year, with a lowest of £33.49 and a highest of £93.73. Those are Which?’s averages across models, not a measurement of one Amazon listing. They are useful as a scale: the annual bill is tens of pounds at the cap if you dry three cotton loads a week, before you apply an off-peak rate.

Dehumidifier with an airer

The linked 12-litre model has a laundry mode that runs for six hours and then switches off. The maker’s published example is about 4p an hour at 26.32p/kWh, which is 4 ÷ 26.32 = 0.152 kW. Six hours is 0.912 kWh: 6.9p at 7.6p/kWh, or 24.0p at 26.32p/kWh. The homepage calculator uses a round 0.8 kWh per drying session so the sliders stay simple. 0.8 kWh is 6.1p off-peak and 21.1p at the cap. Both figures are on this site; they are not two measurements of the same cycle.

A dehumidifier collects water in a tank. That is the practical difference from a heated airer on its own: the moisture from the washing is taken out of the room air rather than left to sit on cold glass. This page does not quote a litres-per-load figure, because that depends on how wet the clothes are and how long the machine actually compresses.

What to run, and when

If the load fits a heated airer and you can give it the 23:30–05:30 window, the 198W Mini is the smallest of these three electricity totals under the assumptions above. A dehumidifier session is in the same few pence off-peak, and it is the option aimed at the damp that indoor drying creates. A heat-pump dryer is the one that finishes a load in a drum without an airer in the hallway. At 7.6p, the assumed 1.4 kWh cycle is still only about 11p, so the reason to own one is convenience and capacity, not a large overnight unit cost.

At the 26.32p cap, the same sessions cost roughly three times as much because 26.32 ÷ 7.6 = 3.46. Shifting a session into the six off-peak hours is worth more, per kilowatt-hour, than swapping between the airer and the dehumidifier. Each unit you move saves 18.7p (26.32 − 7.6), whatever the appliance is.

None of this includes the standing charge, and none of it is a payback period. Shelf prices for the three products were not checked. The links below go to the listings this site features.

Sources

• Ofgem, price cap 1 October–31 December 2026
• Ofgem, unit rates and standing charges
• Octopus Energy, Intelligent Octopus Go
• Lakeland, Dry:Soon family specifications (Mini, 198W)
• Meaco, Arete One 12L (published running-cost example)
• MeacoDry Arete One 10/12L manual, laundry mode
• Which?, tumble dryer running costs

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