Marketing vs Physics

There I was, mug of tea in hand, when the television assaulted me with yet another miracle of modern “British innovation” – a heated clothes rack. A woman beamed with evangelical joy as she draped a family’s laundry over what looked suspiciously like a towel rail on stilts. “Dries a whole load for just six pence an hour!” she chirped, as if she’d personally cracked nuclear fusion.

Six pence an hour! A bargain, if only it worked. But even as the advert rolled, the laws of thermodynamics shuffled into the room, sighing like weary traffic wardens. I could almost hear them muttering: “Good grief, not this again.”

Because here’s the truth – the entire design is an act of physics denial. The heating element sits in the bars. You drape clothes over the bars. The bars warm the bit they touch – and absolutely nothing else. The rest of the garment, hanging limp below, might as well be in a cave. Meanwhile the warm air, doing what warm air does, rises cheerfully away from the soggy fibres and heads straight for the ceiling, leaving your jumper to stew in its own humidity like a damp monk’s habit.

I can picture the product meeting. Some bright spark must have said: “Why don’t we heat the very spot least exposed to air circulation?” And everyone nodded. “Brilliant! Let’s ensure 95 per cent of the fabric gets no heat at all. The other five per cent can boil gently while remaining wet.” Cue applause and a limited-time TV offer.

It’s a masterclass in misplaced optimism. All the energy goes into warming the ceiling, while your clothes hang there looking like drowned flags. The only things that dry properly are your patience and your bank balance.

There’s a grim irony in the idea that you’re “saving the planet” by replacing a 1 kWh tumble dryer with a 300 W rack you must run all night. Yes, it’s cheaper per hour – in the same way that walking to Scotland is cheaper than flying, provided you don’t value time, sanity or a spine.

And of course they always show it in a spotless home, not the fogged-up greenhouse you’ll actually create. After three hours the room hits 100 per cent humidity, your windows drip like a rainforest canopy, and every spider in the house starts migrating towards the drier air in the fridge.

If you really want your laundry dry, buy a heat-pump tumble dryer. It’s faster, cheaper and actually obeys the basic principles of physics. Or use the unheated rack with a fan and a dehumidifier – a combination that costs less and doesn’t require you to outwit entropy.

But please, don’t fall for the glowing promise of the “Rapid Pro” or whatever the latest marketing fantasy calls itself. It’s not rapid, and it’s only pro at one thing – converting electricity into smug advertising copy.

I switched off the telly, muttered “you can’t cheat evaporation”, and took another sip of tea. Somewhere in a lab, a physicist wept quietly into a warm, damp shirt.