Should you dry clothes with a dehumidifier?
By The Damp GuyLast updated
Yes, and it is one of the better uses for one. But the reason is not the one the adverts give. A wet load of washing is carrying water, and that water is going somewhere. Dried on an airer in the living room, it goes into your air, your walls and your windows. Dried in a closed room with a dehumidifier running, it goes into a tank you pour down the sink. You are not removing the water by hanging it up. You are choosing where it ends up.
That framing is the whole answer, and it is why this question sits on a damp website rather than a laundry one. Drying washing indoors is one of the largest moisture loads a household puts into its own air, and it is entirely self-inflicted, which also makes it one of the easiest to fix.
There is real UK evidence behind that, and almost nobody writing about dehumidifiers cites it. Researchers at MEARU, the architecture research unit at the Glasgow School of Art, audited domestic laundering across 100 Glasgow dwellings between 2008 and 2011, with 22 of them monitored in detail including air sampling, and published the results in Indoor and Built Environment in 2014.
Their conclusion on drying washing indoors without a machine, in their own words, is that it "has important implications for energy consumption and IAQ; in the latter case because moisture levels are likely to boost dust mite populations and concentrations of airborne mould spores". That is the finding, stated as they state it. What it does not do is diagnose anybody: if damp or mould in your home is affecting someone's health, that is a conversation with a GP and not with a website.
How to actually do it, which is mostly about the door
Put the airer and the dehumidifier in the same room, and shut the door. That is the bit people get wrong. A dehumidifier works on the air it can reach, so an open door turns a small job into an attempt to dry the whole house, and the washing takes all day.
Do not open the window at the same time either, which sounds like it contradicts every other piece of damp advice on this site and does not. Ventilation and a dehumidifier are two different ways of getting the same water out of the same room. Run them together and the machine spends its time drying outdoor air that you are pouring in through the window. Pick one. For laundry specifically, the closed room and the machine is the one that works, because the moisture is concentrated and you want it captured rather than dispersed.
On how long: Meaco's own laundry setting runs for six hours and then switches off, which is a reasonable anchor for what a load takes. It also says a moving fan makes a real difference, claiming that pairing one with a dehumidifier cuts drying times in half, because air movement across wet fabric is doing half the work.
On machine size, Meaco's guidance is that for drying laundry alone in something like a utility room "one of our smallest units would suffice", but that for households going through a lot of washing "a 20 or 25 litre dehumidifier will be your best option because they will dry the laundry fastest". That is capacity guidance from a manufacturer, quoted as theirs. This site recommends no model and sells nothing.
What it costs, and why I am giving you a method instead of a number
The dehumidifier half is straightforward, because both inputs are published. A compressor dehumidifier draws between 150 and 260 watts, and a desiccant one around 330 watts, both measured at 20°C and 60% relative humidity. The capped electricity unit rate was 26.32 pence per kWh when I last checked it on 1 September 2026, and that cap is reset quarterly, so treat it as a figure with a date on it rather than a constant.
Multiply those out over a six-hour laundry run and a compressor at 200 watts costs about 32p, the same machine at 260 watts about 41p, and a desiccant at 330 watts about 52p. That is arithmetic from two published figures, not something I have measured with a meter.
The tumble dryer half is where I am going to stop short, deliberately. Every per-cycle dryer figure I could find came second-hand through appliance retailers, and the one organisation whose number I would have quoted would not serve me the page. So rather than print a figure that fits no particular machine, here is the method for yours: the rated consumption in kWh per cycle is on the energy label, and on the manual if the label has long gone. Multiply that by your own unit rate, which is on your bill. That gives you an answer about your dryer instead of an average about somebody else's.
One thing that is worth saying without a number attached: a heat pump dryer and an old vented one are not in the same class for consumption, so "a tumble dryer" is not one thing to compare against. Check which you have before you assume the comparison goes the way round you expect.
When drying indoors is still the wrong call
If the house already has a damp or condensation problem, adding several litres of laundry water a week to it is working against yourself, and the dehumidifier is then patching a symptom in one room while the cause carries on. The condensation guide here covers what decides whether that moisture lands on your surfaces, and the ventilation guide covers the version of this that costs nothing to run.
If washing is coming out of the machine already smelling, or going spotted while it dries, the dehumidifier is not your problem to solve. That is mould on the fabric itself, which has a different fix and a deadline, because the longer it sits damp the worse it gets.
And if you are weighing up buying a machine at all rather than using one you own, the wider case sits on the full dehumidifier guide, including running costs over a month and the situations where one is the wrong purchase. Worth reading before spending, because for some houses the honest answer is that a dehumidifier is managing a problem that a repair would end.
Last one, and it is the question people ask next. A dehumidifier running in the room does not cool it down, and a desiccant model will noticeably warm it. That is answered here, and for laundry the warmth is working in your favour.