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Does the dryer shrink your clothes?
As a follow up to the "do you iron your clothes" question, does anyone else experience significant clothes shrinkage (particularly for t shirts) when they put clothes in the dryer? This never used to be a problem, but no matter what settings I use, it always seems to shrink them now!
Anyone got any advice? I am currently hanging my best clothes to avoid shrinkage, but a better solution would be preferred.
I gave up on drying things I care about years ago, after plenty of my favorite things slowly got destroyed. I just got a rack and deal with air drying most things.
What we really need is for Technology Connections to make a video about dryers! His dishwasher video tips took me from “meh” on dishwashers to “whoa”.
I’m pretty sure there are heat pump dryers and he lives someplace with long winters so maybe we’ll get one.
Have heat pump dryer. It's a washer that you put your clothes in, wait 3-5 hours, and they are clean and dry. It plugs in a standard 120V like a regular washer. It's ventless, so doesn't even need that hole in the wall. You're essentially just dehumidifying your clothes dry. On the eco setting, your clothes feel wet when you first pull them out, but then you shake it and the water vapor dissapates and the clothes are bone dry. It's wild.
It causes much less wear and shrinkage in my experience. And it's a lifesaver for anyone with ADHD.
We also gave heat pump dryer (not combo with washing machine like you have) and we have the same experience. Wife doesn't even iron clothes anymore, she just takes them from the dryer and makes them up into the wardrobe.
Clothes doesn't shrink in the dryer for us. LTT had a video not long ago about materials of their apparel and they mentioned they use preshrinked cloth - I never knew about it until then. Maybe there are shirts that are made from shrinkable cloth and the dryer shrinks them...?
My wife sews a lot of her own clothes, and she always pre-shrinks the fabric.
Most clothes are pre-shrunk I thought. I remember seeing it on clothing labels as a little kid and asking my mom about it.
Notably, long dry winters IIRC. Given his penchance for energy efficiency, I'm surprised he doesn't look at "More energy efficient to air dry" and "Damp clothes adding moisture to an excessively dry home in winter" as killing two birds with one stone.
I also have a heat pump dryer like the person below me. Mine is an American model that plugs into 220 still, so it can do full heat pump mode, or regular temps for clothes drying. We like it a lot, and I don't think we have issues with clothes shrinking.
I will say that no matter the dryer I believe some cheap t shirts are going to shrink on their first wash/dry, no matter what. But they should be stable after that.
That video was BS. I followed all of his advice and still need to hand wash dishes before putting them in. That being said it wasn't completely useless. Definitely a YMMV.
This is the video that helped me the most:
Dishwasher EXPERTS agree: For best results, DO NOT pre-rinse your dishes!
She gives you an example of what she's doing. She doesn't bother going into which type of soap to use, because it doesn't really matter. I use the liquid gel because I find the powder annoying to use.
Mine has a piranha, which means I have no filter to clean because it's grinding the food rather than simply filtering the dirty water.
I will say that there are two types of food that simply never come out no matter what settings I use or what tips I try, and the best solution for me is to simply remove them: kale/spinach/cooked leafy greens, and melty cheese. You gotta scrape those away as much as possible in my dish washer.
Personally I found following his tips gave me 80% of the success I expected, but the last 20% is really the annoying part anyway. Getting actually decent detergent made the difference between 80 and 99.9% success for me. I switched from store brand powder to using the ecogeek powder detergent that he helped collab on, and it really rang true for me that the detergent brands intentionally make the powder worse so they can sell you the higher margin liquids and pods.
I've found following the prewash trick (with a quality metal-basin dishwasher), with like a tiny spoonful of powder in the main wash, does the best.
Overcrowding the dishwasher and not properly cleaning it are the only two reasons I ever see it not working.
I recussitated an old, worthless dishwasher in a rental by swapping it from the cold line to the hot, scrubbing every square inch of it,especially inside the sprayers, and then doing several vinegar washes.
This may be what I needed! Thanks.
Interesting, it helped me a lot with the tiny, crappy dishwasher at my old apartment. Still some things that refused to come off (dried peanut butter...) or misloadings that hurt performance (spoons nested in each other), but it definitely helped.
The best tips seemed to be to run the hot water from the sink beforehand and to actually put in detergent for the prewash stage.
I still use the hot water trick he mentioned. I dont see a functional difference with a relatively new dishwasher but the reasoning makes sense so I do it anyway. That's the biggest thing I took away frok the video as well.
DIY appliance repair person here who's fixed a few dryers/washers in the past, it's possible the thermistor is stuck/failing/malfunctioning and causing the control board to always run on high heat, leading to shrunken clothes.
What kind of dryer do you have? A thermistor is usually a pretty cheap part to replace and worth starting there since it doesn't sound like it's always been this way, thus most likely an issue with the dryer itself.
Former appliance design person here! I bet you’re right on the money with this one!
Also, op - have you cleaned out your dryer vent tube recently? If that’s twisted or clogged, it could also lead to higher-than-usual temperatures.just read your response - a condenser dryer is interesting. Usually those go to much lower temperatures (and are way more energy efficient as a result) - have you noticed your dry cycles getting longer? If you’re hitting a secondary thermal safety system (often the case when your primary fails), you’ll be cycling between really high temperatures and really low temperatures, as the safety system resets.Are you in an area with hard water? You may have lime buildup somewhere, which could be affecting evaporation in a way similar to the linked tube idea on vented dryers.
(Saw stuff like this in my five years writing dryness sensing algorithms!)
Fun fact, shrinking is sort of going to occur any time you have fabric motion. High temperatures just usually accelerate the process.
Interesting, I will have to have a look into that. We have a condenser dryer, I can't remember the brand and I am not home at the moment, but I will look into this. Very helpful, thank you!
I dryer all the things. The secret is to have a body of indeterminate shape, and therefore it doesn't matter what shape your clothes are! Unsexy blob FTW!
That's not entirely true, I have some costume clothing that is made of nylon that the dryer can literally destroy by fusing it together, so that doesn't get put in the dryer.
Gotta love clothes that go poof if you even glance at a dryer.
I always use the "delicate" mode and it doesn't shrink them, but it does still slowly degrade them, so I always hang dry when that's an option.
I’ve not actually tried the delicate setting, sounds obvious to try it. Thanks!
Less heat, perhaps? I have a combination washer and dryer and I've not yet had shrinking clothes. But most of my clothes are cotton, no proper wool or synthetics, so I dunno
It's even shrinking the cotton t shirts I have! I don't tumble dry wool as those do shrink very easily.
I would recommend experimenting with temp settings. This would be for two reasons, if the dryer temperature is broken after x minutes on each setting the machine will feel just as hot as any other setting. The other thing would be low vs high. I avoided most of my clothes from shrinking at a laundromat by starting at medium heat, then low to finish. With items like towels or blankets getting washed at medium the whole time. It takes longer of course, but I never personally remember experiencing shrinking from then on.
Interesting. I have played with the temperature settings, but only after my clothes have shrunk, so it was hard to know what works. I’ll experiment some more.
Start with checking your vent! The vent should be cleaned at least once a year, most people are unawareof this.
Cleaning your vent will decrease run time, decrease how hard the machine has to work, and will allow for better regulation of temperature.
Dryers are one of the most common causes of house fires. Not Cleaning a vent allows for the build up of lint INSIDE the machine (the amount of Dryers I have worked on that had already caught fire, several times [unbeknownst to the customer] was absolutely alarming).
Clean the lint screen EVERY TIME!!! No, really, EVERY TIME. For the same reason as cleaning the vent.
Dryers are capable of handling about 20 feet (about 6m) of vent length. If there are elbows in the vent they count as about 5 feet, each elbow. Anything after 20 feet, you need a dryer vent booster.
If your dryer is electric, put it air fluff (runs with no heat). if it's still making heat in that setting, you need a new timer.
Do not run your dryer if you are not home!
Sorry if this sounds alarmist, lint is Very combustible. Same thing as a grain fire/explosion.
All good ideas! I do these already, cleaned the main filter around six months ago, and clean the small filter every time.
What do you mean by "main filter"?
It’s not actually a filter or main, it’s an area with a large surface area where I assume it moves heat to. It is larger and gets some fluff in it but not that much.
The other repairman may be correct about the thermostat.
On electric/gas models that is a rarity. I haven't worked on the condenser type, though.
I can't recall, with clarity, if those vent out or not. I want to say they don't.
In which case, you may completely disregard my vent tirade.
It could still be an airflow problem, though.
I couldn't wrap my mind around how condenser type dryers weren't going to get plugged with lint after a while. Even the old models could do that, and they vented externally.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the question, but I don’t use a dryer, and I’d encourage people to do the same. Air drying clothes is much, much gentler. If you check the tags on your clothes, a lot of them will specify air dry only, which most people ignore.
Even in limited space, you still air dry clothes. It still very common in Japan, Korea, and China to air dry your clothes, and you can find all kinds of plastic devices to hang clothes in creative ways in tight spaces on Amazon or whatever as a result.
A room you can make mostly air tight (a regular door and closed windows is enough, airlocks are not necessary), and put a dehumidifier in with your clothes rack is a good idea. Can highly assist with drying.
I have a heatpump dryer, which helps a lot. It's because a heatpump dryer creates a big heat differential, so it doesn't need to heat up the clothes as much.
What I also found helps a lot with getting your clothes dryer quicker is wool dryer balls. They create pockets of air between your clothes, meaning they dry more quickly and more uniform. It has made a big difference and they don't cost much.
I made some for myself a few years back and they’ve worked wonders for preventing thicker things (winter hoodies) from staying damp when everything else is dry, as well as having a big reduction in how often I get static from the dryer.
I just grabbed some pure wool knitting yarn (no idea if wool blend also works, I didn’t try it) and balled it up and wrapped that tightly in stockings, tied off at the ends. Throw that in the hottest wash and hottest dry cycle your machines can do, and the wool yarn all felts itself together into a single cohesive ball. Then you can remove the stocking outside and the ball stays together, never unravels itself, and works its magic for years!
That's very cool, didn't know you could do it that way! I just bought them at the shops, cost a few quid but if you have wool already might as well use your trick.
Yes, but there is no consistency whatsoever. I have a process that I follow to try to keep the clothes from shrinking but some clothes will shrink no matter what. I have several of these button up (dress) shirts which I wear to work. I've had them for a few years now. Suddenly about two months ago, one of them shrunk after a wash and I can't tell why. You can clearly tell that it's smaller compared to all the other shirts from the same store/merchant but one shrunk for some reason.
Are there places where it’s genuinely not possible to hang dry clothes? Sincerely asking because I’ve never used a drier other than in an emergency (well “emergency” as in I need to wear this an hour after washing it) and always hang dry.
I live in a humid, rainy area - I can sometime hang dry outside, but to hang dry inside the clothes need to be in a smallish room with a dehumidifier. Otherwise some things start smelling a little moldy.
Also tends to be humid here (in a Midwestern not a tropical way), even inside with air-conditioning on it would be difficult and outside would depend on the weather, plus partner can't really hang things well. We hang a few things to dry but mostly dry them. They're done quickly, and even bedding can get fully dry.
As others have said why I live in the UK it is generally wet and humid. Weather is often cold wet or both. So we can hang and I did when I was a poor student but my clothes often smelt a bit of damp. Also have young kids which just quadruples the work!
Where I live, in one of Australia's coolest regions, hanging thicker items (such as towels, jeans, and blankets) in the winter tends to cause them to become moldy before they finish drying. Our winters are very humid and rainy, and even a thin T-shirt usually takes three days to dry. I do hang thinner items, like T-shirts, but it takes them so long and I have such limited space under cover (protected from rain) that I usually can't hang them all. (Pro tip: You can fit more clothes on a line by using coat hangers! I recommend the kind with clips.)
In the summer, however, hanging clothes to dry works extremely well. Our summers are very dry, so even just draping clothes over a chair indoors will usually dry them within a couple hours (and boost the indoor humidity, which is always welcome that time of year).
Edit: Dehumidifiers are great.
...around my cats!..
(they come off the rack clawed-up and tattered)
I always wash cold (may not be relevant) and have always dried on the lowest temp for this reason. I have long heard and read that higher temps tend to be a cause of this. I don't know if proven or one of those myths handed down over time that is assumed true
As others have said there could definitely be other contributing factors possibly- but anecdotally i believe any time i have experienced shrinking clothing in the past it was always due to drying it too warm