A mum calling herself the queen of budgeting has come up with a way of getting your clothes and towels dry on a budget. Heidi Ondrak who is known as the Duchess of Thrift took to TikTok to give her help - and said that her method gets them dry and smelling nice - without mega expense.
In a video which has been watched more than 670,000 times, the Duchess spoke of the ‘nightmare’ of having about two washes a day with all her family’s clothes - and how she tested putting it on a normal clothes horse and it took 36 hours to dry but smelled horrible.
And she explained that using the tumble dryer - which with the cost of power being so high is more than 70p an hour - was just too expensive for most people. She said: “ I wanna talk about something I’ve been dreading. It’s getting your washing dry and thinking about as the weather gets colder how are we gonna wash and get our washing dry without it costing an absolute fortune?”
The Duchess showed her airer outside - which she said takes two hours in nice weather. But added: “It’s been raining here a week, and I had to dry my washing on these basic indoor 36 hours for one with towels on. It took to get dry, and it smelt as bad as when it went in the wash box when it was dry.
“So my biggest issue is getting this stuff dry in the winter in a house where putting my heating on is gonna cost me an absolute fortune. So I’m gonna be really, really limited on the amount of time that I have the heating on in a day. And we’ve been talking about an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, so I don’t want wet washing.”
And she said tumble dryers were too expensive - but that an alternative can be picked up cheaply second hand: “Tumble dryer is a 70p an hour Now. Mine used to be on a couple of times a day, and I do tend to have sort of two washes a day with the kids - they’re a nightmare. We’ve managed to reduce that. But what I have got now is a heated clothes dryer, so this costs six pence an hour to run. I had a look on Facebook marketplace, and there’s quite a lot on there for sale. Second hand. People are getting rid of them. You know, I’m a big fan. If you can get something second-hand, try and find it.”
The Duchess also had a top tip for the heated clothes dryers: “What I will do in the winter is cover this whole thing with a fitted sheet, so the air so the warm air stays in there to try and sort of speed that up. All of these bars are heated so you could hang hangers off them. You can put things through the bars like so, or you can hang them flat. So this is what I’m gonna be using in winter, because 36 hours in a damp house on a regular dryer is not gonna cut it for me as everything smells. So yeah. 6p an hour to run one of these bad boys.”
