Drying clothing outside during the winter?

9 comments

1. If you heat your home, find a place to hang it up inside. If you want to hang out outside it’ll still dry eventually in sunlight. You just have to hang it inside to get the last frost out before you can fold it.

2. Depends on where in Japan you live (I’m in Tochigi), but it doesn’t usually get THAT cold during the day. Also winter is exceptionally dry here so drying laundry outside is perfect.

3. It’s very rarely below freezing during the daytime unless you’re in like, Hokkaido.

4. We dry our clothes outside all year round (in Tokyo). Except on rainy days where we actually use our clothes dryer. I don’t know how people manage the rainy season without a clothes dryer.

   Edit: Family of four so we are doing 2 or 3 loads daily.

5. Hang it inside.

   Did you move to Hokkaido or something?

   Also, we have a weekly stupid questions thread that gets stickied at the top of the page that these types of questions go into. Please use it.

6. Cold and snowy Niigata here. I bought an electric drying rack from Amazon and it was a great purchase. Warms up the room a little bit, too. As I usually only heat the room I’m in, it was taking way too long to dry them otherwise.

7. If you have a laundrette nearby, you could dry your clothes with one of their dryers. That’s what I did last winter (I live in Tohoku though).

8. Dry inside on a folding rack. Winter is usually pretty dry so this will help humidify the room a bit. If your bathroom has a dry setting use that.

9. Depending on what region you are, winter is actually great here for drying clothes because there is way less humidity than summer, and actually quite a lot of sunny days, especially in Kanto. In Tokyo you can count the days below 0 with one hand so it should not be an issue.

   While in Aomori, we used to dry them inside with an open window (closed door of course) and it worked fine even when snowing outside