What Do I Need to Know Before Buying a Dehumidifier?

Two things settle which one you buy: where the water goes when the tank fills, and how cold the room gets in winter. The pint number on the box comes after both, and it is a comparison rather than an answer. The best home dehumidifier for a room is the one that answers both.

Dehumidifier With Pump

The downsides of using a dehumidifier are a tank or a hose you have to manage, noise you hear from the next room, and the electricity it draws all season. A pump takes care of the first one, because it can push water upward to a sink or a window. A gravity hose cannot: it drains by slope alone, so its endpoint has to sit lower than the machine's outlet.

Confirm the room has a problem before you buy a machine for it. Condensation on cold pipes, a musty smell that clears when you run a fan, and a floor that stays damp past the morning are the signs, and the target is below 60% on a hygrometer, ideally between 30% and 50%. That reading is relative humidity, and it is the number the machine's controls work against.

Find your room in the list below, then follow it to the machine.

• A musty smell in the lower level that clears when you run a fan, damp patches or a white bloom on the concrete, and a floor drain or sump the hose can reach: the 35-pint Midea Cube.
• The same damp across a lower level larger than 2,000 sq ft: the 50-pint Midea Cube.
• A damp lower level with no drain, but a sink, a laundry tub or a window above where the machine can sit: the Honeywell 50-pint with the built-in pump.
• One room's worth of damp, a small bedroom where the window fogs on the inside and the closet smells when you open it: the 20-pint Midea Cube.
• A single damp room where the water still has to go up, and no smaller machine that can lift it: the 50-pint Midea Cube with the pump.
• A garage or crawl space that sits below 41F for weeks at a time: a desiccant unit, which absorbs moisture instead of chilling a coil.

The pump is the part that fails first, and the repair is usually cleaning rather than replacing. A kink stops the flow, dust in the condensate turns to sludge that clogs the line, and a pump on its way out shows a blinking light: clean the pump filter and check the run for a blockage. A blocked hose still trips the same full-bucket shutoff, so the float safety behaves the same in either drain mode.

Lift is quoted per model rather than to one standard, so check the figure against your rise before you buy. The Honeywell reaches 16.4 ft vertically or horizontally, and the Midea Cube's pump is rated to 14 ft, which leaves you one machine if the water has to climb 15 ft.

A dehumidifier does run up your electric bill, and by how much is a method rather than a fixed figure: multiply the unit's annual kWh number by the rate on your own bill. Residential rates vary by roughly three to fourfold across states, and two machines with the same pint rating can differ by 73% in the watts they draw, so a national average is nobody's household.

Best Dehumidifier for Basement

The best dehumidifier for basement with drain hose is the 35-pint Cube above, and a lower level larger than 2,000 sq ft moves you up to the 50-pint. The hose is what makes either one work, and gravity is unforgiving about height.

That is the whole setup: the machine sits higher than the destination, the hose runs flat and short, nothing presses on it, and the endpoint stays below the outlet. A stand beside a floor drain does it, and so does a shelf above a sump pit.

If your basement has a floor drain and stays damp all summer, we would buy the 35-pint and skip the rest of the list. If nothing sits lower than the machine's outlet, the pump branch above is your answer, and the lift figure is the number to check before you order. Consumer Reports rates models for basement use inside the same subscription chart, and the figure to hunt for there is water removed at 65F and 60% humidity against the claimed pints.

Two cautions before you spend on one down here. The 41F floor from the list above matters most in an unheated basement, because that is the space that spends winter below it. And a 50-pint GE with the built-in pump still appears on pick lists, while GE lists it as clearance and names no successor, so there is nothing there to buy.

A Midea dehumidifier has shipped under a lot of other names over the years, which is why the 2016 recall list runs to roughly fifty brands rather than one. If you are buying used, read the nameplate first: units made by GD Midea and sold from January 2003 through December 2013 are in that recall, and the brands on it include Frigidaire, GE, Honeywell and Kenmore. Nothing built after 2013 falls in the window, so the check takes a minute and it clears anything current.

Best Dehumidifier for Bedroom

The best dehumidifier for a bedroom is the 20-pint Cube, and the best dehumidifier for small bedroom is the same machine: a lightly damp bedroom falls in ENERGY STAR's lowest band, at 20 to 30 pints a day. Set the humidistat, which works like a thermostat for humidity, and let the machine cycle instead of running flat out.

Noise decides a bedroom more than capacity does. Dehumidifiers run from roughly 50 to 70 dB across the models that have been tested, and the quietest of them sits at about 51 dB.

The 20-pint Cube ships with a gravity hose, so the run has to slope down to a drain or to a window lower than the outlet. If it doesn't, you are carrying a tank to the sink, and no Cube at this size carries a pump to spare you that. The machine takes moisture out of the air and not out of people, so a night with it running will not dry you out. Consumer Reports covers bedroom units in the same chart and weighs noise at 3 ft as one of its six factors, so it is a fair place to check a shortlist against.

Dehumidifier for Apartment

A dehumidifier for an apartment is sized as one room rather than as a house: ENERGY STAR's under-2,000 sq ft bands run 20 to 30 pints a day for slightly to moderately damp, 25 to 40 for very damp, and 30 to 50 for wet. For a 2,000 sq ft house you are on the other side of the line, at 30, 40 or 50 pints for the same three levels.

Two thousand is exactly where the two bands split, and the same guidance says it is better to oversize than to undersize, so take the higher row when your number lands on the line.

The table sorts by dampness rather than floor area, so a 1,000 sq ft basement and a small bedroom land in the same band. A whole house is also not one room to begin with: whole-structure drying is its own category, and ENERGY STAR leaves that job to installers, so the answer above assumes the damp sits in one zone.

The pint number has changed meaning as well. The test condition moved from 80F to 65F, which pulls less moisture out of the same machine, and the compliance date for the new capacity labels was 13 June 2019.

The change is not a rounding error. ENERGY STAR's own illustration has an old 60-pint machine testing near 35 pints today, so a used unit's label and a new unit's label are not the same measurement.

The gap widens further on listings that never mention a condition at all. An AEOCKY dehumidifier is rated in air near 95F and 95% humidity, and a machine sold as an 80-pint unit comes in at about 25 pints a day under the 65F and 60% behind every other number on this page. Compare machines at one condition, or the comparison means nothing.

Consumer Reports Dehumidifier

Consumer Reports runs its own dehumidifier ratings programme and keeps the scores behind a subscription, so the useful part for a buyer is knowing what it measures. The programme currently covers nearly 70 models across Danby, Frigidaire, GE, hOmeLabs, Honeywell, LG, Midea and TCL.

Six things make up an Overall Score: water removal measured in a chamber at 65F and 60% humidity against the capacity the maker claims, humidistat accuracy, energy efficiency per pint removed, how often you have to empty the tank, noise at 3 ft, and reliability plus owner satisfaction from a member survey. The chamber condition is the one the federal rating uses, which is what makes a claimed pint figure checkable at all.

The free page will not give you a winner. The ratings chart loads product names and photos with no scores, and the picks article prints its capacity headings with the models stripped out, so the scores exist only inside the subscription. Treat a secondhand report of a pick as unusable for the same reason.

For dehumidifier reviews in general, two numbers are worth hunting for: water removed at 65F and 60% humidity, and the noise figure with the distance it was measured from. Everything else on a listing is a claim until those two are on the page.