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Washing can dry even when it's freezing

13:00
23 January 2022

Winter laundry tip
Washing can dry even when it's freezing

clothesline

While many of us wait for a warm, sunny day to hang laundry, did you know that you can actually dry your washing when it is freezing outside?

If you want to do something good for yourself and the environment, you can make use of a special property of water to dry your laundry in winter. Even when it's freezing cold!

The prerequisite for this is that it is frosty outside and the air is relatively dry. Once the laundry is frozen, the water skips an aggregate state - namely the liquid state.

This effect is called sublimation. The frozen water evaporates directly. The conditions for this are particularly good when, in addition to temperatures below zero, the sun is shining. A combination we have seen regularly across the UK and Ireland recently.

In ideal conditions, the laundry dries in a day in the frosty air. For this, the sun should be shining and a light wind blowing.

But this is not a must, because very cold air often also brings low humidity. Therefore, it can absorb the moisture of the laundry very well. Another advantage of this is that the laundry smells particularly fresh, ideally it even smells like winter clear air.

The effect of sublimation can also be observed with snow. If it snows at first and then the weather turns dry and cold, the snow cover will become smaller and smaller over time, despite the constant frost, because the white snow simply dissolves into thin air.

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