December 1, 2025, 10:03 am | Read time: 2 minutes
Clothes dry particularly quickly in the summer sun. In fall and winter, it’s a different story. The bulky drying rack often takes up space in the apartment for days because the laundry just won’t dry. The damp clothes also increase the humidity in the apartment—not a pleasant feeling. However, with a simple trick, laundry can dry faster even in the cold months. You don’t need a heater or a dryer for this.
Laundry Dries Faster with a Towel
When wet laundry sits in a room for a long time, the air temperature rises. In the colder fall and winter months, when there’s less ventilation, the result is high humidity. This unnecessarily prolongs the drying process—and mold can even form. To help textiles dry faster, you can use a simple trick with a dry towel—preferably terry cloth.
Simply lay the towel over the wet clothes. Due to its high absorbency, it takes up the moisture from the laundry. After a while, you can feel it: If the towel is mostly damp, you should replace it with a dry one.
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A Matter of Physics
The trick works not only because terry towels are particularly absorbent and can take up a lot of water. There’s also a bit of physics involved. When the towel absorbs some of the moisture from the air or a surface, the water spreads into the fine fibers of the fabric. This significantly increases the total evaporation area. The water can be released into the surrounding air more quickly because there’s more contact between the moisture and the air. In this way, the towel speeds up the drying process.
Don’t Forget to Ventilate
Although the towel effectively supports the drying process, you shouldn’t rely solely on it. Especially during the heating season, regular ventilation is essential to regulate humidity in the apartment and prevent mold growth.
It’s not enough to just tilt the window, as this hardly provides sufficient air exchange. The so-called shock ventilation is much more effective: Open the windows wide several times a day for a few minutes so that the moist air can quickly escape and fresh, drier air can flow in. This air can then absorb more moisture, allowing clothes, towels, and other textiles on the drying rack to dry faster.