Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Executive Summary: If you're in an apartment with swampy air, buy this and place it in a relatively high place in your bathroom(s). Then let it run 24/7 and keep the bathroom door mostly shut to trap the shower steam and such in the bathroom with the dehumidifier. If you actually live in a swamp, or are dealing with wet basement type issues, you probably want the bigger fancier dehumidifiers. My new apartment was pretty swampy when I first moved in. The building is old and the bathroom had a vent but not an exhaust fan to pull shower steam out. The air felt like a humid summer day after rain even though it was spring and 65 degrees outside. I couldn't afford any big/fancy dehumidifiers, but I figured if I got this small one I could shut it in the bathroom with the shower steam and let the two battle it out there. Worked like a charm and the apartment is no longer swampy. Instead, it's just about as humid as whatever it is outside. So if you actually live in a swamp, you probably want one or a few of the big/expensive dehumidifiers for a larger place with more pervasive sources of humdity. (If I cook a big pot of spaghetti with the boiling water or such, I use the exhaust fan over the stove to pull that steam out too. Showers and pots of boiling water were the main sources of excess humidity in my home.) Unscientific Methodology: The bathroom looks something like 5x8 with maybe an 8 foot ceiling. I didn't measure squat, but I'm 5'11" and used that as a point of reference while looking around and using my imagination. I set the dehumidifier on top of a cabinet on the wall above the toilet tank because I figured steam rises under mostly normal air pressure conditions and that's where most of the humidity would start its journey. My 9 year old showers at night, I shower in the morning, and the dehumidifier runs quietly 24/7. The water tank in it fills up about every 36 hours. I slide the tank out, pull out the rubber stopper, and dump the water down the sink and put it back in - it's a random 10 second chore I do after every 2-4 showers. And the apartment is no longer swampy which is really nice. I had a cheap humidity gauge thing too, but was too lazy to figure out how to calibrate it and happy just breathing air that isn't soupy now.