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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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7 Responses to “Dehumidifier”Leave a reply |
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When I first got mine, I put it in the basement. The guy at Home Depot said to run it on continuous mode for 3 days, because the cement in the foundation has a “store” of water in it, and you want it to run nonstop to pull as much out from that as possible.
Mine has a default of 70% when you first plug it in. I put mine down to 65% and theres a noticable difference (during these summer months, I used to be near 90%. Since it was over 10-15 degrees COOLER in the basement, the floors would sweat and grow mold. Not good since Ive got wood panelling downstairs.
I personally think 35% is too low. The dehumidifer should turn off at times, but if you have it that low, its NEVER going to.
You have a nice unit there too, see if theres a hose hookup. Some of these you can drop a small hose into a floor drain, toilet, sink, whatever. That way you dont need to empty the bucket, it will automatically drain into something else.
It’s amazing how much water you have in the air isn’t it? That seems about right, considering it’s an apartment.
How’s Evan Almighty?
Thanks for the info, gambit. I’ll keep it running at 35% for the rest of the weekend, then move it up to 50%, I guess. It does have a hose hookup, but I don’t have anywhere I could drain to unless I put it on the kitchen counter. I’m okay with emptying it out once a week. It’s been running all day again today, so I’m betting I’ll have another gallon or so to dump tonight.
Matthew - Evan Almighty was great! The plot was weak and a lot of stuff just didn’t make sense, but it was still really entertaining. It was much better than Bruce Almighty.
Yeah, you definitely want to jack up the setting on your dehumidifier, and it could take several weeks to dry the area enough to kill the mold and stop it from growing.
Check your house (particularly the mold effected areas) for any sources of humidity that shouldn’t be there - condensation from air conditioners, leaky pipes, leaky joint fittings under sinks, etc.
In addition to using a dehumidifier, one of the best ways to treat mold is to simply spray it with Lysol. This kills the mold instantly and stops it from spreading. So if you have any visible patches, be sure to give them a good spray.
Good luck!
Why don’t you hook up a brita filter to that thing? Why don’t all dehumidifiers have that. You would get clean drinkable water out of the air!
I was thinking that too, Raptor. It seems like such a waste to just dump all that water down the drain. In this apartment I’m not paying my own water bill, so thinking of a good way to use the water is kind of pointless.
I think they should make dehumidifiers that fit perfectly on top of a toilet tank. That would be the perfect place to use the excess water. Oh wait, maybe it would start sucking all the water out of the toilet.
Then again, this thing probably won’t continue to produce a 1.5 gallons of water every single day. Though it’s Sunday now and it’s still showing no sign of slowing down. I wonder how much electricity this thing eats up.
As much as it rains in Oregon, I wonder why people don’t figure out a way to drain part of the water from their roof into the toilet tank. Or better yet, collect it all into a big tank, maybe in the attic, where it gets purified and used throughout the house. Sinks could have 3 knobs - cold, hot, and rainwater. Even if you couldn’t drink it, rainwater would probably be good enough for doing the dishes, taking a shower, washing the car, watering the lawn, etc. Quick, somebody patent this idea and go make billions!
“Or better yet, collect it all into a big tank, maybe in the attic, where it gets purified and used throughout the house”
You mean like the big tank at the water treatment plant?