Garage Dehumidifiers – What Type of Dehumidifier Is Best For A Garage?
In common with a lot of questions the answer begins with…”it depends”. It depends mostly upon where you reside because the first of two key issues may be the ambient temperature of your garage.
If your home is within the among the warmer parts of the planet you’ve more choices to choose from but when you will find months of the year whenever your garage may be 60F/16C or lower for weeks or months at any given time you will need a dehumidifier able to effective low temperature operation.
A simple room dehumidifier is going to be sufficient but, if it’s a refrigerant type it must have an energetic defrost feature. An energetic defrost system, also known as “hot gas defrost”, stops the compressor and redirects heated air over the cold coil to melt the accumulated ice. This quickly removes the issue, the compressor restarts as well as your dehumidifier is back in business.
Few room dehumidifiers have this feature. In its place there is a passive defrost feature usually referred to as “auto-defrost”. What happens when ice forms would be that the compressor stops, the fan keeps running and also the ice is melted through the incoming air.
The low the ambient temperature the more it requires for the ice to melt. In low temperatures the dehumidifier is going to be defrosting for additional time than dehumidifying.
Dehumidifiers with “auto-defrost” in many cases are rated for operation in temperatures as low as 41F/5C but all of this really means is that the dehumidifier will not be damaged at such low temperatures. The sad the fact is they’re scarcely effective when it gets so cold.
The 2nd key concern is the amount of relative humidity you need to maintain. To safeguard your vehicle, your tools, equipment and other things created using steel from corrosion it is important to keep relative humidity no greater than 55%, preferably 50%.
Refrigerant dehumidifiers begin to struggle when relative humidity falls below 50%. A room dehumidifier of reasonable quality will maintain 50% RH but it is going to do so more reliably whether it includes a little more power than the section of your garage might suggest is needed. It will cost more to purchase a rather larger dehumidifier however it will remove more moisture per Dollar, or Pound, of one’s consumed, and should run for fewer hours daily, so might be less expensive within the long term.
The ideal option would be a desiccant dehumidifier. What we should are talking about here is a unit that appears just like a refrigerant dehumidifier, sounds like a refrigerant dehumidifier and it has an admirer, but removes moisture by capturing individual water molecules on a desiccant (water adsorbing) wheel or rotor. That “d” in adsorbing is not a typo. The term describes a chemical process, distinct from absorption the industry physical action typified by a sponge soaking up water. This type of dehumidifier isn’t to become wrongly identified as containers of silica gel, without moving parts, which remove small quantities of water and are best suited to closets and drawers.
Because refrigeration isn’t involved in the process this type of dehumidifier will operate quite happily down to 33F/1C and will comfortably reduce relative humidity below 50%.
In the united kingdom both types of dehumidifier are readily available. The Mitsubishi MJE16VX is a superb refrigerant dehumidifier with hot gas defrost and the ideal refrigerant dehumidifier for any garage. If your desiccant dehumidifier is preferred there are several to choose from, such as the highly regarded Meaco DD122FW-MK4.
In the united states everything is not too good. Desiccant units are extremely hard to find and therefore are not available in the major retailers. Refrigerant dehumidifiers with hot gas defrost are almost equally rare although one or two suppliers are listing the Mitsubishi unit, but at the ridiculous cost of nearly $800, more than twice the buying price of those found on sale in the united kingdom.
For $800 or perhaps a little less a small industrial dehumidifier, like the Ebac CD30, may be purchased. One such as this provides hot gas defrost, is rated down to 33F/1C while offering the higher toughness for a unit built for demanding industrial applications. Small desiccant dehumidifiers built for industrial use are also available but they are a lot more expensive.
This kind of expense might not be also considered by many people but if you’ve got a classic car kept in storage inside a garage you might feel it’s worth the investment.
One final point; when the contents of your garage are sufficiently precious to justify the expense of a dehumidifier it might be advisable to invest a bit more to buy a high quality hygrometer, a device for measuring relative humidity. The humidistats on dehumidifiers, more particularly room dehumidifiers, aren’t always accurately calibrated. Better to be safe than sorry.