Wet load, dry load and why cloth hangers come down

Cotton straight out of a washing machine weighs roughly three times what it weighs dry. That single fact explains most cloth hanger failures. A rack advertised against a dry load can be at or beyond its working limit the moment a full wash is hung on it, and it will be in that condition for several hours every time it is used.

So the useful question to ask a supplier is not how much the rack holds, but what its wet working load is for the configuration being installed. We state that figure for what we fit and load-test every rail before handover, which is a much more honest basis for comparison than a headline capacity.

The second common cause of collapse has nothing to do with the rack. Fixings anchored into a false ceiling of gypsum or cement board cannot carry this load and will eventually pull through, usually taking the whole rack down with them. Where a false ceiling exists, the fixings must pass through it and anchor into the structural slab above, which is why we scan the ceiling before drilling if there is any doubt.

It is worth asking directly whether a quotation includes locating the slab. It is a small amount of work and it is the difference between an installation that lasts and one that fails without warning.

Rail count and length should follow laundry volume and the width of the bay rather than a stock size. In humid places such as Kochi, Vijayawada or Thiruvananthapuram, clothes dry slowly and the rack stays loaded for longer, so it is worth specifying more line length than the wash volume alone suggests and spacing rails wider so air can move between garments.

Shared and staff accommodation is a different duty altogether, because the system is cycled many times a day and wears out on cycle count rather than corrosion. There we specify heavier rails on shorter spans, upgraded pulleys and a shorter service interval, and we treat rope and pulleys explicitly as replaceable wear items.