An online tool can tell households the best time to hang washing on the line, hour by hour, as autumn weather becomes more unpredictable.
The service, known as the Laundry Drying Guide, is provided by independent weather forecasting website Netweather. It gives an hourly breakdown of weather conditions in a user's area across seven days and rates when the best time is to get a load out.
How the guide works
The site factors in a range of weather parameters that could affect how quickly clothes dry, including temperatures, rainfall, windspeed, and humidity. From this data, the website rates each hour from poor to superb for line drying.
For example, the Laundry Drying Guide states that a "superb" time to hang out washing in Glasgow this week is between 4pm and 5pm on Wednesday, September 23. It also says households in the city will want to avoid putting laundry outside on Monday, September 28, as conditions are currently ranked as "poor" throughout the day. However, as the weather is unpredictable, this could easily change as the week progresses.
Optimal drying conditions
Netweather forecaster Jo Farrow has shared the optimal weather conditions for drying clothes outside in the coming weeks. She states that the ideal temperature for drying common fabrics on the line is 12C with a 15mph wind.
If these conditions are met, Farrow states the following laundry will dry, on average, in: synthetic t-shirt - two hours; cotton t-shirt - three and a half hours; towel - five hours; jeans - eight hours.
These optimal conditions may come as a shock to some, as a survey by Brabantia found that more than a fifth of people wouldn't dry their clothes outside unless the temperature was above 15C.
Radar for unpredictable weather
According to this week's data, the best time of the day to put washing out to dry is in the late afternoon before the sun begins to set. However, this is reliant on weather conditions remaining dry.
As Scottish weather is known for being unpredictable, the website also offers users a local weather radar for the area they are looking for. This "nowcast" shows a map and the likelihood of a rogue downpour happening in the next hour, helping Scots determine when to put clothes outside to dry and when not to bother.
