Key findings
- Electric blanket rose 54.0% week on week, the largest move of the twenty terms we track.
- The five fastest risers were all heating or damp items: electric blanket, smart thermostat at 35.6%, hot water bottle at 27.1%, dehumidifier at 25.6% and heated airer at 22.3%.
- LED face mask fell 12.0%, the steepest fall in the set. Portable monitor, tower fan, burglar alarm and Korean skincare all fell by between 10.4% and 10.8%.
- The damp turn still holds. On a shared scale dehumidifier led tower fan 30 to 2 in the week of 4 October 2026, eight full weeks after 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 9 to 15 October 2026, measured on 16 October 2026 against the seven days from 2 to 8 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 index was not measured for the weeks to 10, 17 and 24 September or 1 and 8 October 2026. Those weeks have no edition, and we have not filled them in after the fact. The previous edition is the week to 3 September 2026.
Movers, week to 15 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
The top of this week has moved on from drying the house to keeping warm in it. Electric blanket at 54.0% and hot water bottle at 27.1% are bought to heat a person rather than a room, and smart thermostat at 35.6% is the same decision made at the boiler. The data does not say why. The likeliest reading is the calendar, since mid October is when many households first put the heating on in the evenings.
The damp side of the season is still building alongside it. Dehumidifier rose 25.6% and heated airer 22.3%, and carbon monoxide alarm at 10.7% and slow cooker at 8.2% sit just behind.
At the other end, LED face mask at 12.0% down leads a cluster of five falls between 10% and 12%. Tower fan at 10.7% down is the summer still letting go. Portable monitor, Korean skincare and burglar alarm have no seasonal reading we would trust, so they are worth watching rather than explaining. Burglar alarm was also the odd fall in the last edition.
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 16 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 19 against 13. The next week it was 8 against 14. By the week of 13 September it was 3 against 25, and in the week of 4 October it was 2 against 30, 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 eight full weeks running, and that the separate seven day measurements in the table above point the same way. The week of 11 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 2 to 15 October 2026, so both weeks come out of one normalisation and the two means are comparable.
- Change is the mean of 9 to 15 October against the mean of 2 to 8 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 16 October 2026.
- Measured on 16 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 15 October 2026. Whito Ltd. Available at https://lookinto.co.uk/trending/uk-demand-index-2026-10-15/ (measured 16 October 2026).