When I’m on vacation, the last thing I want to think about is laundry management. But with back-to-back swim days, getting your gear dry is essential for the next round of summertime fun. Hanging stuff on a fence or a deck railing doesn’t cut it, and accordion-style drying racks are often flimsy. Unless you’re willing to live with clothes and towels dangling from every doorknob in your home, you may resign yourself, as I have, to a life of summer dampness.
Then I saw videos touting these tripod-style drying racks, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes. One influencer calls it a “portable, foldable space saver,” a description often used for the more common accordion-style drying racks.
To me, it looked cumbersome—a heavy plastic tube on spindly wooden legs destined to tip over. I ordered two versions online and tested them both.
In the end, they weren’t the easy-to-use miracle cure I’d been promised.
The drying rack all over my feed
Buy from Amazon.com
Two damp shirts hanging from a tripod drying rack. This vintage tripod drying rack has a cute old-timey aesthetic but isn’t practical for most people. Photo: Joshua Lyon.
Wirecutter ordered an $80 Dozont-brand rack on Amazon similar to the ones the influencers recommend. For comparison, they also bought the Hoomic Tripod Drying Rack from Wayfair, typically priced at $330 but often “on sale” for $178. They turned out to be the exact same product, differing only in the color of the carrying handle.
In fact, this umbrella/tripod-style drying rack is not a new design. Wirecutter senior staff writer Joshua Lyon has a vintage version, made by the Artmoore Company of Milwaukee, picked up at an antique store.
“It’s not a convenient tool,” he says. “There’s nothing to contain the 12 rods or tripod legs, so carrying it from the corner where I stash it to a space large enough for its circular sprawl feels like holding a large, squirmy squid. But it makes me happy that this rack is still in use after decades. I like the old-timey look, and it does a fine job drying T-shirts that I don’t want to shrink in the dryer. But I’d never recommend buying one of these unless you’re into the aesthetic and don’t have kids.”
The modern version has a central plastic pipe and wooden spindle legs that extend into a tripod base. The rack part is formed by tentacle-like arms that pop out as radii from the center. Both the drying arms and base legs slot back into the 28-by-6-inch pipe for storage.
I tested both units in a beach house, a small lake bungalow, and two suburban basement laundry rooms.
It was not worth it.
It’s unstable
Several swim clothes and towels on a tripod drying rack. I had to move the drying rack to a shady, protected area since it kept blowing over at the beach. Photo: Annemarie Conte.
I was particularly excited about using this drying rack outside. I grew up in a clothesline family, but there’s no good spot for a clothesline in my sloped backyard. I missed air-drying my clothes.
Some product photos show the rack in an outdoor setting, but the first time I set it up with bathing suits and towels, the wind blew it over. The whole unit came apart, and I had to reconstruct it, threading all of the arms back into the base.
If you use it outdoors, place it on an extremely stable surface, such as concrete (no grass or rocks), and away from the breeze. Good airflow is the best way to dry wet fabrics quickly, so avoiding the breeze defeats the purpose.
Even inside, if the floor is slanted, the rack tilts. My inclination has been to unload it one half of the circle at a time, starting with the side closer to me. Unfortunately, that causes a seesaw effect—a low side where I’m taking off the clothes and a high side flinging clothes to the ground.
It doesn’t take much to knock the rack over, so I would be concerned about using it around small children.
Although the rack has notches in the arms for hangers, there’s no great way to secure clothes without hangers. I tested two types of spring-style clothespins to secure clothes, but it was something I thought to do only after trial and error.
It’s not particularly space-saving
Two towels and a pair of shorts on a tripod drying rack. The drying rack takes up a lot of room when fully extended. Photo: Annemarie Conte.
A collapsible, modular drying rack appears to be great for small spaces—and it’s marketed as such—but it takes up more room than expected. Sellers recommend extending just the number of arms needed and backing the rack up to a wall or corner. In practice, that makes the unit imbalanced and prone to tipping over.
To functionally use this rack, it needs to be fully extended. Each arm has 19 inches of usable space, and the whole unit has a diameter of 44 inches when fully open, making it a room hog in operation.
I used the rack in both my basement laundry room, which is tight on space, and my mother-in-law’s, which is bigger. In both cases, the rack occupied so much space that doing additional laundry while the rack was open felt awkward. Moving the rack to a different room just shifted the problem.
While the unit is compact for storage, it isn’t as compact as an accordion-style drying rack that can collapse and lean against a wall, or a mounted drying rack in a laundry room.
It’s awkward and heavy
Several towels and other damp cloths on a tripod drying rack in front of a room fan. When I used it indoors, adding a fan helped dry the clothes more quickly. Photo: Annemarie Conte.
Sellers market the rack as portable. “This drying rack is suitable for small laundry rooms, compact yet functional. Suitable for camping, hiking, laundry room, dormitory, apartment, garden, college dorm, balcony, terrace, and laundry, making your family more comfortable and beautiful,” reads the Amazon listing for the Dozent model. “An elegant clothes drying rack as a gift for your wife,” the description adds.
It isn’t easy to lug around, and it weighs over 6 pounds. When my husband packed our car for the beach, he grunted that it should come with a bag or a carry strap.
The lock to keep the legs inside the tube for storage doesn’t always catch, and they slip out as you’re moving it.
If you transport it, the arms rattle inside the pipe. The sound drove me nuts while we were driving back from the lake, and you can’t dampen that noise since the arms are relatively loose in the tube.
The takeaway
For now, my best option is to use quick-drying Turkish towels and continue the timeworn tradition of using clotheslines, railings, and the backs of chairs. Spending $80, $130, or even $300 on this clunky thing is ridiculous.
