washing

The Washing Line Index

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A screenshot of the Washing Line Index for our local area

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.

It’s worth buying a new washing machine

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Today, I’m going to talk to you about washing machines. We bought a new one last month, and it is so much better than our old one in several ways.

The new washing machine is this Bosch model, which is normally £399 from John Lewis. We actually paid much less, by combining loads of gift vouches from the wedding and a cashback offer that was on at the time. This is now installed in our new house.

Our old washing machine is the one in our flat. It’s a Hotpoint washer-dryer, so it will wash and tumble-dry our clothes in one process. It’s probably around 10-15 years old as we assume that it was installed when the building was converted from a mill into flats.

For a start, washer-dryers are never as good as stand-alone washing machines and tumble dryers. Indeed, the dryer part of our old Hotpoint machine is pretty rubbish – if you’re lucky, it’ll get a half load mostly dry in around two and a half hours after the wash cycle is completed. Bigger loads will come out wet.

But it’s also not that great at washing either. It’s okay, but takes its time, and the drum can only take 6 kilograms of washing – about 13 pounds in old money.

The new Bosch machine has a much bigger drum that can take 8 kilograms (17.6 lb), so we can wash a third more clothes in each cycle. It’s significantly quieter, and barely makes any noise apart from during the spin cycle, which is still comparatively quiet. This is good for us as the washing machine is in the kitchen, which is directly below the room that will become the baby’s room when it’s born.

As well as being a good price, we also chose the Bosch model because of its energy and water efficiency. It’s rated A+++ for energy usage, which is the highest possible rating, and it required the least amount of water. Indeed, it looks like it uses less water than our current machine despite being able to handle bigger loads.

Despite using less water and electricity, the Bosch machine still manages to be quicker than the old Hotpoint machine – even when you enable its energy efficient mode. So not only does it wash clothes more quickly, it costs less money to do so. And it has a countdown timer telling you how long it has left. Timers these tend to be standard on new machines nowadays but this is the first time I have owned one with a timer, and it’s really useful.

We chose to get a water meter fitted to the house, and so conserving water will save us money in the long term, as will the reduced electricity costs. Furthermore, as we’ve opted not to buy a tumble dryer, this will save us more money on electricity bills in future. The house has a drying rack in the kitchen and space outside for washing lines, which we don’t have in the flat. And with a little one on the way, we’re likely to be using the washing machine far more often than now.

If you have an old washing machine, I would advise you to consider a newer model. The improvements in energy and water efficiency may well save you money in the long term and make up for the cost of buying a new machine. We’re really pleased with ours.

Plus, if you get rid of your old machine, you can create silly YouTube videos like this one.

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