Compare our top 10 basement dehumidifiers and give your home the air quality it deserves.

Dehumidifier Shopping Guide

Imagine: You wake up, you’re not sniffling, you don’t have to take Zyrtec, and you can smell everything around you. No, you’re not dreaming...you’re just living a life with a dehumidifier. If you have allergies, you may not have considered a dehumidifier as a solution, until now.

Allergens love water. If you’ve ever left clothes in the washer for too long, you were probably punished by the nasty, musty smell of mildew. And then there’s mold. Mold grows best when surrounded by dampness, so bathrooms and laundry rooms are especially prone. Let’s not forget about dust mites, which absorb water through their bodies to grow and live happy little dust mite lives in your home.

Where there is mold, mildew, and dust mites, there is sneezing, puffy eyes, and potentially respiratory problems like asthma.

Allergies aren’t the only reason to buy a dehumidifier. In your tool shed, you may have noticed rust forming on your wrenches or a bike chain. You can give your tools and other metals new life by removing the water hanging out in the air around them.

For an affordable price range, you can get a home dehumidifier that can solve these annoyances and give your space better air quality.

What's the Right Dehumidifier for Your Home?

Since dehumidifiers address environmental issues in your home, purchasing the best unit depends on where you live.

First, consider your geographical location and how humid the outside air is. You can live in a humid environment where frizzy hair is the involuntary trend, or you can be located in a dry environment where lotion is your best friend. Whichever type of climate you’re in should determine the power and type of dehumidifier you’ll need.

When shopping for your new dehumidifier, you’ll notice models based on the quantity of water they can remove from a room at a time. For example, a 50- and 70-pint dehumidifier is relative to the amount of water that the machine can take out of the room’s air in a day.

The physical size of a unit does not necessarily correlate with these numbers. Instead, the more pints a dehumidifier removes, the more powerful its compressor must be.

Back to the climate differences: If you live in a drier climate, you may not need as powerful a unit that’s capable of removing 70 pints of water from the air per day. However, you will want a dehumidifier you can set to your humidity preferences. Since your body is already dealing with dryness, you may want to consider a unit that will shut off at a certain percentage of humidity.

For a dry climate, you can turn to a 30-Pint dehumidifier for a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and low-maintenance option that you can control with the push of a button.

Dehumidifiers range from eliminating 9 ounces to 70 pints per day. This huge difference means it’s important to know exactly how much power you need for your home or space.

What Size Dehumidifier Should You Get?

When referring to the size of a dehumidifier, this relates to the volume of water that a unit removes from a room in 24 hours. You'll see that each model is described with a certain number of pints in front of the model name — this tells you how many pints a dehumidifier can remove from the certain square footage. The square footage capacity is also indicated with each model. 

You'll want to base your choice on whether you want to remove humidity from a large, open-plan living room or a smaller laundry room. Take a look at the rough suggestions for dehumidifier size according to certain rooms of the house: 

Laundry Room: A typical laundry or utility room in a house is less than 100 square feet, which falls well within the limits of a 30-pint dehumidifier. If your laundry room is noticeably humid and you're seeing signs of increased moisture, you can use a 40-pint dehumidifier to rid the moisture more quickly. 

Bedroom: Using the general dimensions of a 125 square foot bedroom (this is a bit larger than a small bedroom), you can stick to a 30- to a 40-pint dehumidifier.

Living Room: A living room with 350 square feet is what we're using to gauge the ideal dehumidifier. With this in mind, a 30- to 40-pint dehumidifier will work in these parameters.

Basements: Since open-space basements can cover quite a bit of space, and thanks to their tendency to retain more moisture than other rooms of the house, you'll want a dehumidifier that can remove 50-60 pints per day. If you're dealing with extremely wet conditions in a space that spans over 1,000 square feet, you'll want to consider a more powerful dehumidifier that can remove up to 60 pints of moisture per day. 

As another way to calculate the size of your dehumidifier, you can use these measurements as a general rule of thumb while you shop:

• 30-Pint Dehumidifiers: Cover mildly damp rooms up to 1,500 square feet
• 40- and 50-Pint Dehumidifiers: Cover damp to moist rooms up to 2,000 square feet
• 60-Pint Dehumidifiers: Cover very damp rooms up to 2,500 square feet 
• 70-Pint Dehumidifiers: Can rid rooms of extreme moisture up to 2,500 square feet

Which Dehumidifier is Best for Cold or Warm Climates?

For some dehumidifiers to operate, they need to be in a space where the temperature does not fall below a certain number.

Homeowners whose rooms face extreme temperatures need to take this into consideration when purchasing a new dehumidifier. For standard home units, 65°F is the normal operating temperature in which you won’t need to consider specialty functions in your dehumidifier.

In colder spaces, take a look at low-temperature models. Models will specify their low-temperature capabilities if they’re designed for it.

Other models have a defrost option. If the room where your dehumidifier is located will be at a low temperature, like below 65°F or 18°C, this could cause the water to freeze within the dehumidifier, ultimately causing damage. With a defrost function, the unit takes care of this issue automatically, lowering the maintenance needed in a colder room.

Homes with warmer air typically do not need to consider this feature when making their selection.

What is Tank Capacity?

Along with the physical space it takes up in a room, the unit’s size has a lot to do with how much water it can store before needing to be emptied. The water taken out of the air doesn’t just disappear — it’s collected by the unit and stored in the unit’s bucket or emptied into a drain if that unit has a hose attachment.

You’ll notice that some units feature continuous draining options, which means they can attach to a hose that spits the water out into a nearby drain. Without this option, the unit will stop any time its tank capacity has been reached, meaning that it will not continuously run without you emptying the tank. You can have a dehumidifier that removes 30 pints of moisture from a room, but if it has a 7-pint tank, you'll have to empty it every time the tank is full. 

Check out the water tank capacities of each model to ensure you’re not emptying your dehumidifier every few hours. Tank capacity can only be so big as the unit allows. The amount of water you’ll be emptying depends on how humid the space is. In the most powerful non-industrial units, 1.5 gallons of water is the max tank capacity.

Does a Dehumidifier Need a Drain?

The thought of emptying a water bucket every few hours might make you reluctant to buy a dehumidifier. Luckily, you can stop worrying about having to manually drain your dehumidifier. Most units in our top picks have the ability to continuously drain the water they collect. They don’t come with a hose, but they do come with a hose attachment that is easy to set up.

Before buying a unit that has this capability, consider drain placement and where your unit will be. For a continuous draining option, your dehumidifier will need to be above a drain so gravity can do its thing and eliminate the water collection. You can also consider running the hose to a condensate pump, which is a different appliance and expense altogether.

Continuous draining can make the difference between a high maintenance or low maintenance appliance, so if that’s a priority for you, then make sure your future dehumidifier has a hose attachment.

What is Humidity Control? 

To maintain optimal comfort in your home, you'll want to keep about 30 to 50% relative humidity. When using a dehumidifier, you want the perfect balance of removing moisture from the air without drying out your living space — this doesn't have to be a manual guessing game that you try to control. Some dehumidifiers have humidity control, allowing you to set a limit and ideal range of moisture to keep in the air. These smarter models can keep your home at the perfect level between too dry and too moist, helping keep your allergies at bay without any added thought or manual control from you. 

Does a Dehumidifier Lower Energy Costs? 

Finding the right size dehumidifier can be the first step to ensuring you're saving energy with your unit — a machine that works efficiently means that it shuts off on a timely basis and doesn't continue to run throughout the day. With our top picks, you'll see that some are Energy Star rated or UL-certified. The Energy Star determination refers to a high-performance appliance that is energy efficient. A UL certification is given by the Underwriters Laboratories, which verifies the safety of a product via testing. 

A dehumidifier works with your A/C and heating system to remove moisture from the air, allowing your HVAC system to work more effectively. Without added mugginess in your home, the perceived temperature feels cooler, keeping you from turning up the air conditioner on high.

In the end, a dehumidifier is a supplemental tool for keeping your energy bills low, saving you money on your monthly balance. 

Choose Your Dehumidifier

You’ve now got the knowledge to pick out the perfect dehumidifier for your home. Picking out the perfect dehumidifier depends on the size of the room you want to use it with, as well as the climate in the area you live. If it’s a jungle out there in your home, then dry it up. For those deserts, clarify just how much you want to dry it up. No matter where your home is located, you deserve top-of-the-line air quality.

Anyone experiencing allergies, increased asthma, mold, mildew, and other results of excess moisture in the home can find a dehumidifier to be helpful. A noninvasive solution to include in your living space, a dehumidifier can help clear the air and keep you from constantly reaching for allergy medicine. Take a look at our top picks, find the perfect fit for your home, and start breathing a little easier knowing the humidity in your room is kept under control 24/7. 

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