Proof drying laundry inside is making your home mouldy, even if you can’t see it

A mould inspector’s discovery in a Sydney home reveals just how bad drying laundry inside can be for our health and our home. 

Break the Mould Inspections owner Tracey Seymour found the affected dining table in a room where washing was hung to dry. 

In footage posted to Instagram, you can see the table looks fine to the naked eye, but a UV torch shows the underside covered with the fungi. The combination of the wood, dust on the table and the increased humidity in the room meant mould established there quickly within a day or two.

Seymour told nine.com.au a standard load of washing contains a surprising amount of water, which doesn’t just disappear as the clothes dry.

“If you’re drying that washing inside the house, that three to four litres of water has to evaporate, and it’s your contents and your walls and things like that absorb that moisture,” she said. 

“In any household, we’re always trying to keep the humidity below 60 per cent relative humidity because mould can’t grow beyond 60 per cent.

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“So if you’re adding three to four litres of water, even one to two litres of water, you can still increase your relative humidity by thirty per cent, which is huge. 

“We live in Sydney, where it is a humid environment anyway, so we should always be trying to reduce the humidity indoors because it’s always quite high outside. If you’re going to go and add more moisture, you’re putting more pressure on your indoor environment to suck up that humidity.”

Seymour often sees mould caused by drying laundry inside, particularly in spare bedrooms. This sort of room creates the perfect conditions for mould because not only are there plenty of items like a bed and carpet to collect the excess moisture, there is also little airflow since the room isn’t used as much.

Of course, for those of us who don’t have a dryer we don’t have much of an option in winter but to dry washing inside. Fortunately, there are ways to make it safer for ourselves, our belongings and our home.

“If you’re needing to dry your washing indoors, doing so in a space like a bathroom or a laundry, one of those wet areas where you’ve got predominantly tiled surfaces, not porous surfaces, is the ideal situation,” Seymour said.

“It’s OK to put them in there, but you still need some sort of ventilation, and you need some sort of dehumidification. So if you’re going to put a clothes horse, for example, in a laundry or in a bathroom to dry, you still want to have an exhaust fan running, and you still ideally want to have a dehumidifier.”

It’s advice worth following, as unfortunately the dining table in Seymour’s video will likely have to be thrown out.

There are a few factors to consider when deciding if a mouldy item can be restored, including whether members of the household are sensitive to mould and the type of material the object is made from.

“The table was not a sealed wooden table, so it had some raw wood to it,” Seymour explained.

“What happens is mould has very deep roots, so it embeds itself quite deep into the substrate, into the wood. You might be able to wipe off some of that surface mould, but the roots are still in there, living within that substrate, and then all it takes is a bit of moisture for those roots to take off, and you get mould again. That’s why people find mould keeps coming back.