Drying wet clothes releases moisture into the air. Heated airers are no exception, and increasing the amount of moisture in the air will increase the risk of condensation. It’s effectively a fan on detachable tripod feet with a pole, at the top of which there are six spokes designed to hold up to 12 hangers of spin-dried or well-wrung damp clothing (up to 10kg). It’s particularly useful for shirts and blouses, since being able to hang T-shirts in this way means they dry straight with minimal creases, meaning less ironing. But it’s less useful for drying, say, towels. Heated bar clothes airers use (as the name suggests) heated bars to dry clothes, with each one acting like a mini radiator.

Dry:Soon 3-Tier Heated Airer Cover - keep the heat in and speed up drying with this deluxe cover which also doubles as a storage bag for the folded Dry:Soon 3-Tier Deluxe Heated Airer. A typical drying pod will do a cotton load in a couple of hours, and a tumble dryer will take anywhere from one to three hours to do a big load of laundry. It's faster than air-drying indoors, but a heated clothes airer is still the slowest of the three.

They also dry clothes a good deal faster than non-heated clothes airers, taking four to six hours – depending on the model – to dry a cotton load.

Fold down dimensions and floor space: Keep in mind the size of the airer when it’s folded down so that you have room to store it. That said, most are compact and will take up minimal space. How we test clothes airers I found the Dry:Soon took around four to five hours to dry lighter materials; and closer to 10-12 for heavier jumpers and the like. In the world of heated clothes airers, that’s really pretty good – the cover certainly does its job. Keeping this in mind, a tumble dryer would most likely dry a regular washing load much faster for the same electricity cost or probably even less. However, if you have an older model, running it would cost more and investing on a more energy-efficient heated clothes airer will cut your electric bills. But the savings reduce dramatically for larger laundry loads, where you'd need to use the heated airer multiple times to dry a load that could fit in the tumble dryer in one go.Heated clothes airers are proving exceptionally popular this year, given the high energy prices. My top-rated airers may temporarily sell out. These are currently the best places to look for alternatives: