A cheaper, easier and fewer time-consuming effort than renovating your house to rid yourself of damp, a dehumidifier can keep the established order during the humid seasons and prevent having to urge down into the foundations. it is also particularly useful if you're renting a humid house.
A dehumidifier essentially removes the moisture from the air, helping to stop mold.
How does a dehumidifier work?
Most dehumidifiers, including most of the models we test, work by refrigeration. They draw air in, filter it, calm to condense the moisture, then reheat it and push the hotter, dryer air back tothe space. This warms the space somewhat, but not the maximum amount as an actual heater. Refrigeration models operate best in hot, humid conditions. the warmer the air, the betterit'sto chill it by an out sized amount and extract moisture from it. they do not work so well within the cold air as it's harder to chill already cold air so as to condense water from it.
Desiccant rotor dehumidifiersare getting more readily available. These models use a slowly rotating disc or belt of fabric which absorbs moisture from the air; the damp section then moves through a drying process (typically a heating element), which evaporates the water and collects it within the tank.
What kind of conditions does a dehumidifier work best in?
The best sort of dehumidifier for your home can depend upon whether you mainly got to dehumidify in cold damp conditions or hot humid conditions.
Because they do not use cooling to extract the moisture, desiccant rotor models are oftenfar more effective than refrigeration models in cold climates; actually, their performance should be largely unaffected by the air temperature. We tested an honest desiccant and an honest refrigeration model in identical hot humid conditions (30°C and 80% relative humidity) and located that both performed to their rated water removal rates. The desiccant model performed much an equivalent as in it did in cold conditions. The refrigeration model, which had performed relatively poorly in cold conditions, performed alright in hot conditions; on the average, it extracted quitefourfoldthe maximum amount water in hot conditions because it did in cold conditions.
This shows that both desiccant and refrigeration dehumidifiers can do the work in hot humid conditions. But desiccant models rarely exceed a rated extraction rate of 10L/day, while you'll find refrigeration models rated up to 30L/day or more. So for heavy-duty de humidification in hot conditions, a refrigeration model would be the simplest option. The better-performing refrigeration models in our tests should perform alright in hot conditions.
But note that the dehumidification process also canend in the air being heated to some extent, so if you only need moderate dehumidification in hot conditions, an air conditioningcould bea far better option, as these dry the air as they calm.