Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Before going into the lengthy list of design flaws, a positive trait... this thing pulls moisture out of the air like crazy (if set to a certain mode). It can lower the humidity in my basement from 70% to 55% overnight. Nothing bad to be said about dehumidifying capabilities. However, it accomplishes this with so many design flaws that I must assume there are much better dehumidifiers available. The number and severity of design flaws are staggering. I wouldn't purchase this unit again. After 2 months of use here are the design flaws I have encountered: 1) The unit sometimes doesn't turn off when full of water; spilling water everywhere. Unless connected to a hose, the unit collects water into an attached container. When the container is full the unit is supposed to shut off. This happens most of the time. On two occasions the unit didn't recognize that the container was full and kept running. My carpet was soaked for days. Upon inspection, the switch that detects the water level in the tank was stuck. 2) It collects moldy water. If you don't connect a hose for constant draining, water drains into a collection bucket. However, some water collects in the closed-off hose inlet inside the unit (see photo). Quite a bit of water. That water sits there permanently, stagnant, left to grow mold. Want to remove that water occasionally? Take out the stopper and all that stagnant moldy water pours down the back of the unit. 3) Hard to empty without spilling water. The water collection container must fill nearly to the top before the unit auto shuts off. To remove the container it requires a pretty strong 'tug' to unseat it from the dehumidifier. Without fail, that tug causes the water to slosh in the container and spill on the ground. You need to keep a towel under the unit. 4) It's not portable. I want to dehumidify my basement, main level, and upstairs on alternating days. I'm 6'1" 225lbs and it's a chore to bring up & down the stairs. No way my wife could do it. It's both heavy and has small side handles that are difficult to grip. I'd need to buy 3 units if I wasn't strong enough to bear-hug it and lug it up & down the stairs. There must be more portable units available. 5) The packaging is insufficient, leading to shipping damage. The box has styrofoam at the corners, but the side has no protection other than the cardboard. During shipping, it seems the shipper's knee went into the side of the box and cracked the back plastic of the unit (see photo). The shipper should have been more careful, but good packaging would have prevented damage. 6) This thing pumps out lots of heat. Be prepared to run your AC while running this unit. Using a testing tool I borrowed from work I found that the inlet air was 73 degrees F, but the outlet air about 90 degrees F (see photo). Keep this in mind - while dehumidifying the space you will also significantly heat up the space unless you also run your AC. Yes, I realize that all dehumidifiers use heat to extract the moisture - this is more of an FYI than a design flaw. 7) It's not cheap to run. While running the unit uses about 750 watts of energy (confirmed via Kill-a-Watt meter). Doing the math... if you run the unit 6 hours per day 1/2 of the year, at the national average of 11.5c/KWH, the cost will be nearly $100. This is on top of the cost you'll spend running the AC to counteract the heat the unit is putting into your house. Again, not sure this is much different than other dehumidifiers, just an FYI for first-time dehumidifier purchasers like myself. 8) The humidity monitor is inaccurate. I borrowed 2 different hydrometers (humidity meters) from my office, one is expensive lab-grade & one is a cheap one you buy on Amazon. I also have humidity readings on my thermostat. I placed the 2 hydrometers on top of the unit, and the unit near the thermostat, and allowed them an hour to adjust. The 2 hydrometers, and my thermostat, measured within 1% of each other. This dehumidifier reported 7% lower than all 3 other readings! I allowed this experiment to run for multiple days - the dehumidifier continually reported 5-7% lower than my 3 hydrometers (ex: 47% vs 54%). It seems it wasn't calibrated correctly at the factory. 9) "Turbo Mode" (high fan speed) really should be the standard mode. Using a Kill-a-Watt power meter I see that when in "turbo mode" the unit only uses about 10 watts more. That's really nothing for the increased dehumidification you get from cycling more air through the unit. A better option would be to have "turbo mode" just be standard operation, and allow the user to select a "quiet mode" which is low fan speed. An average user probably doesn't use "turbo mode" and misses out on the benefits. 10) The air inlet is poorly placed; you need to put the unit in the middle of your room. The unit sucks air from the back of the unit and discharges it on the side. This means that during operation the unit needs to be pulled away from the wall - inconveniently put in the center of the room. A much better idea would have been to pull air in from one of the sides and discharge it on the other side. 11) "Comfort mode" doesn't work like you'd expect. According to the instruction book, "comfort mode" keeps the humidity below certain levels depending on the air temperature. In my use of this feature, the unit does not do this. (Maybe because, like the humidity reading is incorrect, the unit's temperature sensing is inaccurate. There's no way to display the temperature on the display, so I can't confirm or deny). Using the Kill-a-Watt I can tell when the compressor or only fan is running. While in "Comfort Mode" it cycles back and forth between the compressor and fan-only often, with no pattern I could tell, and without keeping the humidity in the range mentioned in the instruction manual. It seems to be doing something, but it isn't doing what you want it to. 12) Really only 1 mode is useful. The only mode I've found to be useful is CONSTANT RUN (confusingly labeled "Const." on the interface) with Turbo Mode active. All other modes are garbage and don't work how you want. The instruction manual is not very helpful in determining what the other modes do. 13) The filter isn't a filter. What is called a "filter" is like chicken wire. It keeps chickens out, but won't keep much of anything else suspending in your air out. 14) It wakes my kids up at night. When the bucket gets full the unit beeps, loudly, and lots of times. What starts the night as a nice white-noise generator is a timebomb - at some point during the night turning off the white noise and replacing it with loud beeping. 15) Label on front of unit impossible to remove & leaves a sticky mess. Why spend time designing a product and then use a sticker with adhesive that requires Goo Gone and scratching with your fingernail to remove? It took me about as long to remove the ugly red sticker from the front of the unit as the rest of the setup process. Does it keep my house dehumidified? Yes. Would I buy this unit again? No way.