Is it worth hanging your washing out to dry? If you live in the UK, then The Washing Line Index is a web site designed to help you make that decision. It was created by a guy in Sheffield, and gives a score from 1-5 for how likely it is that your wet laundry will dry if hung out.
I’ve written about how we dry laundry before, using a combination of a tumble dryer, heated drying rack and hanging clothes outside. Obviously, we hang out clothes more in the summer, when the weather is better, but an app like The Washing Line Index comes into its own at times like this, when the weather is more unpredictable. Indeed, we’ve had a rather warm end to September, and I’ve been able to hang washing out and get it dry twice this week, which has been nice.
How The Washing Line Index works
The Washing Line Index looks at four key metrics:
- Maximum temperature
- Chance of rain
- Peak wind speed
- Humidity
A good drying day will be warm, with little to no chance of rain, quite windy and lower humidity, and so this will most likely score 5 on The Washing Line Index. Obviously, a day with a high chance of rain is going to be a poor drying day, but the other factors come into play as well. A day where there’s no rain forecast, but it remains cold, overcast and with no rain, is not going to be conducive to drying your clothes.
I’ve used it a few times this past week, and it’s been mostly right. However, on Tuesday, it only offered a score of 3, whereas I decided to risk it and actually got a full load of laundry dry within just three hours. It’s therefore only as good as the data being fed into it, which comes from OpenMeteo. As well as offering live data, you can get a three day forecast, as shown in the screenshot above.
I’m sure it’ll come in use over the next few weeks, as the occasional good drying day might still crop up as we get closer to winter. After that, we’ll be back to our heated drying rack, which works well but is slow and expensive to run all night.
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