The European design standard for timber structures provides, besides obligatory safety requirements, a set of general serviceability requirements. Despite their generality, they have been proven important in design of timber structures, especially in varying climatic conditions, where the time dependent deflection can have a dominant role in long term performance. The total deformation consists of instantaneous elastic deformation, hygroscopic deformation, time dependent creep and mechano-sorptive deformation. The three latter deformations are influenced by climate, and when the change in climate is considerable over time, the deflection will significantly increase. In this paper a test-setup is created to study the effect of mechano-sorption on the global deflection of clear wood samples. The samples are loaded in a three-point bending test subjected to a constant mechanical load combined with a cyclic climatic load. The moisture induced stress and bending distortion were simulated by taking into account elastic, hygroscopic and mechano-sorptive strain. The non-linear moisture flow was simulated using Fick’s law. A parametric study was performed to obtain a better understanding of the constitutive equation, especially the term related to the moisture and temperature dependent diffusion coefficient. In addition to the simulations, an experiment was performed to verify the global deflection and mass change. The obtained results show that the mechano-sorption behaviour of the tested clear wood samples can be modelled, but an improvement of both the experimental setup and the model is required to come to more accurate conclusions on this type of long-term material behaviour.