Exact Answer: 45 Minutes – 24 Hours
Clothes are one of the necessities of man. Nowadays, clothes are made of various types of fabric, wool, and thread. All these varieties of clothes are different from one another in terms of the comfort they provide, the feel of the fabric, the time required by the cloth fabric to air dry, etc.
It is an essential condition to wash one’s cloth after one has worn them. Thus, when there is a variety of clothes present out in the market, it is natural for one to wonder about the duration required by the clothes to completely air dry on their own after washing.
How Long Do Clothes Take To Air Dry?
| Type Of Fabric | Indoor Drying | Outdoor Drying |
| Denim or Jeans | 12 – 24 hours | 4 – 8 hours |
| Cotton clothes | 4 – 8 hours | 3 – 6 hours |
| Towels | 8 – 10 hours | 3 – 6 hours |
| Undergarments | 2 – 3 hours | 30 – 60 minutes |
Air drying the clothes involves swinging the clothes either indoors or in one’s window or balcony and waiting for the air and sunlight to do their job of making wet clothes after washing, dry to enable one to safely store them in one’s wardrobe or closet.
For air drying of clothes, they are no major prerequisites. Just a gentle breeze and little sunlight are enough to make one’s clothes dry. Air drying helps in the evaporation of moisture present in freshly washed clothes. Several clothes can be easily hung at once for air drying.
It is essential to leave about an inch space between two clothing items to ensure that there is good airflow between and among the clothes which would help in speeding up the drying process. Fabrics let out for air drying should be nicely stretched out, ensuring that the clothes are not crumpled to prevent wrinkles on clothes after they are dried up.
It is extremely abstruse to generalize a common duration for every type of laundry to air dry as there are numerous factors like fabric type, sunlight, season, temperature, etc to consider for determining the drying time. However, on a normal day with warm sun and a slight breeze, it could take a minimum of 45 minutes and a maximum of 24 hours for the clothes to completely air dry.
Why Does It Take So Long For Clothes To Air Dry?
Air drying is the primitive and original way of drying clothes after washing which is still in practice today. One can save a lot of money by drying freshly washed clothes either indoors or out for letting them air dry. It is extremely simple to let one’s clothes air dry naturally without much hassle.
One might consider air-drying their clothes when one does not want to spend a lot of one’s hard-earned money on the process of drying clothes which can also happen naturally. Air-drying greatly helps in saving on utility bills as electricity for an electrical dryer is not required if one plans on getting their clothes air-dried.
Air drying can be done either indoors or outside. If one is keeping their clothes for air-drying outside their home, in the window, or the balcony, just a gentle breeze, and some sunlight would in a few hours completely dry out one’s wet clothes which are straight out from the washing machine.
However, if the clothes are being air-dried indoors, it is essential to keep the fan on, to enable the clothes to dry faster. The breeze from an indoor fan is fair enough for clothes to dry completely if kept for drying indoors. Thus, don’t forget to turn on the ceiling fan when keeping laundry for air-drying inside the house.
Lastly, one must be patient while the clothes are kept for air-drying. This process is not like blow-drying one’s clothes by an electric dryer which would immediately dry one’s clothes. It is a slow process but with cost savings on electrical bills.
Conclusion
Air-drying is a comparatively slower process and could take hours for clothes to completely dry. It is extremely hard to generalize the time that could be taken by one’s cloth to dry via air-drying. Also, different types of clothes take different amounts of time to dry properly. Hence, one might not be able to determine the exact time needed for clothes to air dry.
However, on a pleasantly sunny day with a light breeze, most clothes would dry in about 4 to 6 hours. However, this time could get extended to 24 hours for thicker fabrics like denim or jeans.
References
- https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074370
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15428110208984712
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