On Monday, the company that owns my apartment dropped off a dehumidifier for me. It’s a nice LG model with a digital display and all kinds of features and options on it. Our hope is that sucking the moisture out of the air will eliminate the occasional giant splotches of mold that occasionally show up in the bedrooms.

I immediately turned it on and let it run all day. I set it at it’s lowest setting, which was 35% humidity. The highest setting is 75%. It ran continuously all day, and after 8 hours I dumped the water out of it. It was about 1.5 gallons of water. That’s a lot of water to be sucking out of the air! The next day it ran all day again, and I dumped another 1.5 gallons into the sink. Yesterday it ran all day and I dumped another 1.5 gallons.

I’ve never used a dehumidifier before, but the amount of water it’s sucking up seems insane. The guy who suggested getting it said it had a large water container in it and I’d probably only have to empty it every few weeks. If I ran it all night too (I don’t because it’s loud) I’m sure it would completely fill the water container inside of it every day.

I’ve been told by a couple people now that my apartment feels damp, kind of like a basement. Probably because my floors are all concrete, instead of being raised off the ground or having a basement like a normal house.

Is 1.5 gallons of water a day normal for a dehumidifier? Anybody know? Anyone know what setting I should have it on? Is 35% too low? I’m hoping it’ll start to slow down after another day or two. It can’t keep sucking more than a gallon of water out of the air forever, can it? What’s bad is that we haven’t had much rain in weeks now. Hardly any at all. So is it going to get even worse once it starts raining nonstop like it usually does?

In other news, the kids and I had a fun week in Idaho. We saw Evan Almighty, went to the lake for a day and did a lot of other random things. And I got a new laptop! After 7 years of using the same old HP, I finally got an upgrade. It’s an Dell Inspiron E1505. It’s got an 80 gig hard drive, 512 megs of RAM, built in wireless, a DVD burner, and two 1.73GHz processors. It came with Ubuntu installed on it but I added Windows XP to it so now it dual boots. I’m waiting about another year to start using Vista since it sucks right now.

It’ll be so nice to have a laptop that I can take out of the house. The battery on my old one kept dying so it doesn’t last more than a couple minutes on the battery. This one lasts about 4 hours on the battery, plus I’ve got a spare battery for it. So 8 hours of laptop for me with no plugging in!

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