You should never live in a house that has a humid basement. Not only does it pose a health risk to you, but it also compromises the structural strength of your home. If you find that your basement is humid, you can use a dehumidifier to eliminate the excess moisture. This is a special appliance that ensures that your basement is free from too much moisture. It sucks the interior air, dries it out and releases moisture-free air.
There are many varieties of basement dehumidifiers available today. They are organized according to three main features. Here they are as well as some guidelines on how to maintain your basement dehumidifier.
An automatic hose drain outlet or manual emptying basement dehumidifier
Once the dehumidifier has removed the moisture from your interior air, this vapor is condensed unto droplets. They are collected in an internal container. Over time, this container will become full of water. After this occurs, the water needs to be eliminated. For this purpose, there are two types of dehumidifiers.
The manual emptying dehumidifier requires you to practically remove the container from the dehumidifier. After that, you need to pour away the accumulated water and clean the container. Once that is done, return it into the dehumidifier so that more condensed water can drip into it.
The automatic drain hose outlet dehumidifier operates in a very different way. It is equipped with a drain hose outlet. When the reservoir container gets full of water, the dehumidifier activates a pump. It pumps the water out of the reservoir container and into the drain hose outlet. This water is directed towards a dedicated draining location. In this way, the automatic dehumidifier empties your reservoir container without any need of human intervention.
If your basement has moderate levels of humidity, a manually emptying basement dehumidifier is ideal. That’s because you will not have to keep emptying it often. On the other hand, if your basement has high levels of humidity, you’ll need to get an automatic emptying dehumidifier. It will perform the heavy lifting for you saving time and effort.
The capacity of its reservoir container
This is essentially the amount of water that your dehumidifier’s container reservoir can hold. Small dehumidifiers can hold from 1.6 to 1.75 gallons of water. With this capacity level, the humidifier requires emptying once or twice a day. Basement dehumidifiers with this capacity are usually small, portable and require manual emptying. There are other basement dehumidifiers that have a reservoir capacity of 1.8 to 2 gallons. Some even go all the way up to 2.5 gallons. They are heavy duty units that can go for two or three days without requiring you to empty the reservoir container. They are applied in Basements that have high moisture levels. In this way, they can absorb and eradicate as much moisture as possible. Furthermore, high capacity dehumidifiers normally implement automatic emptying processes.
The rate of moisture removal per day
Another important element of dehumidifiers is its rate of moisture removal per day. This is the amount of moisture that a dehumidifier can remove from the basement air. The number of pints that a unit can remove depends on the power rating of the dehumidifier. Powerful units can extract higher levels of moisture than less powerful ones.
Generally, basement dehumidifiers can extract between 50 and 72 pints of moisture from the air. The 50-pint removal capacity is coupled with a moderately strong compressor unit. A basement dehumidifier that can remove 60 to 65 pints has a higher wattage compressor. The most powerful units can achieve a moisture removal of 70 plus pints per day. These are the ones that are perfect for heavy-duty usage for example in humid locations.