Does it matter if dehumdifier in the basement is in a closed off room?
PLIERS
| Posted in General Questions on
Good afternoon, hope all is well. I have a dehumidifier for the basement. For sake of keeping away from kids I wanted to put it in an HVAC room I’m building that is separated by stud partition wall with drywall on one side and open ceiling from a main area I want to use for kids. Will it still dehumidify the whole basement if it is in the HVAC room? I guess this goes for the whole basement, do any separate areas need their own dehumidifier? The basement in whole is small probably much less than 400 sq with all the masonary walls so the dehumidifer is big enough to control the whole area
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Search and download construction details
Replies
If you have good air circulation between the rooms you shouldn't see much difference.
I have exactly the same situation as you in my own home, the humidifier is in an area we call the "small basement", which we use mainly for storage. There is a door between the small basement and the main basement, and an opening that used to be a crawl space access hatch (the previous owners dug out one of the crawl spaces -- by hand (!!!) -- to make it a full basement). What I've found is that with the door closed, which is how we usually have things, the small basement will be maintained at the humidity setpoint, but the main basement will be slightly (up to 5-10% or so) higher than the small basement. If I put in a small fan to circulate air between the two spaces I'm sure that would even out, but I haven't bothered. Due to the way the small basement was dug out, it tends to be more humid thant the rest, so the humidifier is essentially in the area where most of the moisture comes in anyway.
In your build, I would at least put some pass through vent grilles in that dividing wall so that air can circulate.
Bill
There is also a temperature effect from a dehumidifier in a small, marginally vented room - and this reduces dehumidifier efficiency. But "magnitude matters" and I don't have numbers.
It’s an 8x6 room so I was thinking maybe 3 plastic vents on the wall. My other issue is right now I have an old hvac drain hose that shoots outside of the house but it travels about 6 feet up to ceiling and 10 feet to outside. I’d like to buy a little $50 dollar pump because my dehumidifier doesn’t have an automatic pump. Not sure what would be strong enough to pump the water out. If possible I would like even further to send anything even further away. It has a bucket you can dump which is fine but don’t know how often I will have to manually dump it
A condensate pump will handle pumping the water from the dehumidifier out, all of $41 at the orange store:
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Little-Giant-VCMA-20ULS-115-Volt-Condensate-Removal-Pump-554425/204481225
Use some vinyl tubing as a drain line. You can support it with cable staples for large round cable -- use the plastic staples with the captive nails.
Bill