Can You Use an Extra Spin Cycle to Dry Clothes?

In a rush and need to dry your clothes fast? You may be tempted to run your outfits through another spin cycle to dry them out.

But is this extra spin cycle really going to dry your clothes, or are your items going to feel damp when the cycle ends? Find out below!

 

Why Use an Extra Spin Cycle?

Before a washing cycle comes to an end, your laundry will go through a cycle called a ‘spin cycle’. The purpose of this cycle is to spin your clothes around in the drum really fast, so all the water is removed from them.

As a result, when you take the laundry out of the washer, your clothes won’t bogged down with liquid, and they can be picked up and moved to the line/tumble dryer.

An extra spin cycle is when you run an additional spin cycle, like the one mentioned above to remove even more moisture from your laundry. By running your washing through an extra spin cycle, you can reduce the drying time of your items because they shouldn’t contain much liquid.

Extremely wet laundry takes an age to dry, even if you tumble dry it. So, you can speed up the drying process by removing as much unwanted liquid as you can by using the spin cycle.

A washing machine usually runs a single spin cycle automatically. However, to run an extra spin cycle, the user normally has to tell the machine to complete this cycle again.

Like a spin cycle, an extra spin is measured in ‘rpm’ and this stands for ‘revolutions per minute’.  The rpm figure essentially tells you how many times the drum will spin around in a single minute.

Washing machines in the UK most commonly have rpms that are between 400 and 1400. The higher the number, the more spins per minute the washing machine will do.

As you can imagine a high rpm and an intense spinning motion isn’t suitable for all materials, so it’s usually used on harder-wearing materials like cotton.

A lower rpm is typically used on delicate materials, like silk. Although, in some cases, you shouldn’t run delicate materials through a single spin cycle, so an extra spin would be out of the question (check clothes tags).

A spin cycle doesn’t take very long to complete, and in most cases it only takes a few minutes – between two and twelve minutes on average, so it can be a quick way to speed up the drying process a bit.

 

Can You Use an Additional Spin Cycle to Dry Clothes?

If you need to speed up your drying process or reduce your drying costs, running your laundry through an extra spin cycle is certainly going to help you. The additional spin cycle will remove a lot of unwanted moisture from your laundry, so you’ll be able to dry it more effectively later on.

However, running extra spin cycles will not completely dry your laundry like a tumble dryer would! To dry your clothes, you need to pop your washing on the line outside, use a tumble dryer, or make use of a heated airer.

All a spin cycle does is extract water from your freshly washed laundry by spinning it around quickly inside the washer’s drum.

So, running an extra spin cycle, just means that you’re going to repeat this process, but you’ll end up removing even more water from the clothes.

Your laundry, however, will not be dry after it leaves the washer, even if you’ve run it through an additional spin cycle. And you certainly wouldn’t be able to wear your clothes in this damp condition!

You need to dry your laundry thoroughly before you put it away or wear it.

  

Is an Extra Spin Worth It?

Yes, there are cases when running an extra spin cycle is worth it, especially if you’re cleaning harder-wearing materials like cotton.

Running your clothes through another spin cycle will remove even more moisture from them. In turn, this should reduce how long it takes you to dry your laundry and could help to reduce any running costs too (you might be able to run shorter drying cycles in the tumble dryer, for example).

In addition to the above, you might find running your clothes through an extra spin cycle is useful if your freshly laundered laundry has got wet on the line.

Popping your wet clothes back in the washer for an extra spin will remove any rain water from them! This, again, will speed up the drying process for you.

That being said, you must be careful when spinning delicate materials, as the motion can sometimes damage the material. So, if you’re going to be cleaning silks and lace, for example, you must either avoid running these materials through a spin cycle, or choose the lowest rpm (normally 400 rpm) and spin the laundry once!

In the case of delicate materials, completing an extra spin could cause more damage than it is worth. So, it wouldn’t be worth carrying out this type of cycle.