In this week’s newsletter: the best gifts for Swifties, heated clothes airers, winter coats and the non-Tesla electric cars to consider

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Testing heated airers is like weighing kittens. There’s a meme in which a cat’s weight is recorded by a scale as “0kg” because it’s too light to register. I had similar (though less cute) results when trying to compare the best heated clothes airers by weighing laundry. My wet washing left my inaccurate digital bathroom scales unmoved at zero.

There’s little diversity in the world of heated airers. I sourced a dozen: some had triangle frames, some were winged, and others – such as my favourite, the Lakeland Dry:Soon Deluxe 3-tier airer (currently reduced for Black Friday) – had embroidered covers. Basically, though, they’re all clothes horses that you plug in. Finding clear distinctions between them meant I had to devise fair, quantifiable tests, chief among which was a laundry weigh-in every half hour to measure how efficiently each airer dried an identical load. I ended up splitting each load into batches for weighing in turn (and turn, and turn again) on my tiny but accurate kitchen scale.