Key findings
- Moisture absorber rose 35.4% week on week, the largest move of the twenty terms we track. A week earlier it was flat.
- Window vacuum was second at 30.5%, then electric blanket at 29.6%, heated airer at 25.1% and hot water bottle at 21.7%.
- Carbon monoxide alarm fell 3.3%, the steepest fall in the set. Seven of the twenty terms fell and none fell by more than 3.3%.
- The damp turn still holds. On a shared scale dehumidifier led tower fan 34 to 2 in the week of 11 October 2026, the widest gap since the turn in the week of 16 August.
Every Friday we measure how far UK search interest moved for the products we write guides about, and publish the movers with the method attached. This is the edition for the seven days from 16 to 22 October 2026, measured on 23 October 2026 against the seven days from 9 to 15 October.
Editions are not rewritten. Next week gets its own page and this one stays as published, so the run of weeks can be read back later. The live version, which always shows the current week, is on our trending page.
The previous edition is the week to 15 October 2026.
Movers, week to 22 October 2026
The two middle columns are mean daily Google Trends search interest for that term, on that term's own 0 to 100 scale. Each term is requested separately, so a 90 on one row and a 60 on another do not mean the first term is searched more. Only the change column compares like with like.
What moved
Both of the top two this week are condensation products, and both rises lean on the weekend of 17 and 18 October. Window vacuum hit its fourteen day high on Saturday 17 October and was back below its previous weekly average by the Thursday, so its 30.5% reads as one busy weekend rather than a trend. Moisture absorber held up better: every day of the week beat its mean for the week before. The data does not say why the weekend was busy.
Keeping warm stayed near the top. Electric blanket rose 29.6% on top of last week’s 54.0%, and hot water bottle 21.7% after 27.1%. Smart thermostat slowed to 19.7%. Heated airer at 25.1% had its second week in a row above 20%.
Tower fan rose 12.6%, which looks odd for late October. That is a rise on its own scale from a low base. On the shared scale in the damp turn box below it sits at 2 against 34 for dehumidifier, which rose a more modest 7.7% this week after 25.6% last week. Burglar alarm rose 11.4%, most of it from a single day on 20 October.
At the other end nothing fell far. Carbon monoxide alarm was down 3.3% and air fryer 3.1%, and the other five falls were all 2% or less. In the last edition five terms fell by more than 10%.
The damp turn, 2026
Put tower fan, dehumidifier and heated airer into a single Google Trends query for Great Britain and all three sit on one shared scale. Re-run on 23 October 2026 over the previous twelve months, that query still shows fans leading dehumidifiers through the summer, then losing the lead and not getting it back.
The last week fans led was the week of 9 August 2026, at 18 against 13. The next week it was 7 against 14. By the week of 13 September it was 3 against 24, and in the week of 11 October it was 2 against 34, the widest gap since the turn. Heated airer went from 1 to 8 on the same scale over the same period.
We call that switch the damp turn: the week UK search demand stops being about moving air and starts being about removing water. In 2026 it landed in the week of 16 August.
The catch is that these are small numbers on a shared scale, so any single week could flip on sampling noise. The gap has not widened in a straight line either: it narrowed to 2 against 18 in the week of 20 September before opening again. What makes this a turn rather than a wobble is that dehumidifier has stayed ahead for nine full weeks running, including this week, when tower fan rose faster on its own scale. Google Trends rescales every request, so a few of these figures sit a point away from the ones in the last edition. The week of 18 October is still incomplete and is left out.
What this does not measure
This is search interest, not sales. It says how many people looked, not how many bought, and it cannot tell a buyer from someone reading about a product. It is also not a count of searches: Google Trends reports a relative index, so a term can rise on the index during a week when total UK search volume fell.
We track the terms we have guides for, so the set is a sample of the market and not the market. Cost indexes and claims audits that do not map to a single product term are left out rather than forced into a term that would not be honest.
Method
- Source: Google Trends, Great Britain, daily series, one request per term.
- Each request covers 9 to 22 October 2026, so both weeks come out of one normalisation and the two means are comparable.
- Change is the mean of 16 to 22 October against the mean of 9 to 15 October, to one decimal place.
- Google Trends resamples, so re-running a query can return a figure a point or two out from ours. Each row links to the exact query so anyone can re-run it.
- The damp turn figures come from one separate request for tower fan, dehumidifier and heated airer together, Great Britain, weekly series over the twelve months to 23 October 2026.
- Measured on 23 October 2026. Nothing on this page comes from a retailer and no figure here is a sales figure.
Written by Jacob Whitmore, Whito Ltd. See our methodology and how we make money. Guide links go to our own pages, which carry Amazon affiliate links.
How to cite this
Look Into (2026) UK Demand Index: week to 22 October 2026. Whito Ltd. Available at https://lookinto.co.uk/trending/uk-demand-index-2026-10-22/ (measured 23 October 2026).