Five tips to help completely dry damp towels before your next shower

The only thing that makes stepping out of a hot shower in winter bearable is the thought of drying of in soft, cosy towel. But that can be a little bit tricky when the cold – and often rainy – weather makes everything slower to dry.

Having towels dry by the time we have our next shower isn’t just for our comfort, it’s also for hygiene as moisture provides a breeding ground for bacteria and mould to grow. You’ll also find that the faster towels dry the less musty they will smell.

Towels should be replaced every few days, and while you can replace them sooner if they stay damp you'll find yourself doing laundry more often if you don't get two to three uses out of a towel.

To prevent your towels staying damp between showers, you could always toss them in the dryer if you have one, but it's probably not something you want to do every day.

So here are some tips to speed up the towel drying process in your bathroom without the dryer.

Spread each towel out

While it saves space and looks neat to fold your towel in half lengthways to hang on a towel rail, your towel will take much longer to dry. Spreading the towel along the rail means air can circulate around it, allowing it to dry faster.

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Increase your drying space

Spreading towels out means taking up more space and ultimately the entire rail so you'll need more places where you can hang your towels. Consider installing or adding more drying racks to your bathroom.

A rail installed on the outside of your shower glass is the perfect spot and there are plenty of over shower racks, rails and hooks you can get. There are even ones that don't need to be installed and simply hung over the shower screen.

You can also add an over door towel rack to your bathroom door. It has three rails to drape damp towels over.

You can also just hang towels over the shower to dry, and I also use the edge of the bathtub if I run out of space. The bathtub edge is also where I put my bathmat after a shower so it can dry faster and not get dirty too quickly.

Use clothes airers

Not just for wet washing, pop a clothes airer in the bathroom (if there's space), in the laundry or even outside on a sunny day, and add your damp towels to that to space them out for faster drying.

If you're not keen on the idea of a clothes airer, there are free-standing towel rails that allow for two or three towels to be spread out. Ikea has one with two rails for $29, while Howard's Storage World has a metal version with three racks and a shelf at the bottom

Increase ventilation

The antidote to dampness is ventilation, so make sure you're using a fan during your shower and leave it on for a while after to remove excess moisture in the room. This will in turn help your towels to dry faster because there will be less lingering moisture around them.

If you have a window and it's not raining, open that up after a shower and keep it open as much as possible to increase air flow in the room.

While you're at it, open the blinds too so that sunlight can enter the room to aid in the drying process and further reduce moisture in the space.

Try a different room

Some people take their bath towels to their bedroom instead of leaving them or taking them back to the bathroom.

This means there are less damp towels trying to dry in the one small damp room.

A freestanding towel rack would work well for this, or you could try an over the door rail.

If this is your preferred way to speed up the towel drying process, just be mindful that the dampness can increase the risk of mould and mildew, even on the outside of a door.