Daily Home Renovation Tips

• Solar Charged Electric Lawn Mower
• Exterior Solar Shades
• Retractable Screens
• Solar Air Heater

Each of them helped to reduce the direct and indirect consumption of non-renewable energy resources in our home, reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated in and around our home, and reduced to varying degrees our electric, home heating and home cooling utility bills month after month after month. Energy conservation, check. Money saving (some longer term than others), check.

This year, my first new energy savings toy (a boy needs his toys, right? ;-)  ) is the SaniDry Basement Air System. We acquired it from Basement Systems, one of our long time site advertisers (their basement waterproofing advertisement is over there on the left in the Site Advertisers area). After all, we might as well eat our own dog food, right?

Now, here is our need. Our youngest daughter uses the bedroom in the basement when she is home from college (she’s not attending her dad’s personal favorite, the University of Notre Dame; rather, she is attending the University of Waterloo, a fine learning institution in it’s own right … it’s where the founders of a formerly small start up company, Research in Motion, got their start).

So, when she is home we want her environment to be comfortable. Even though we have a walkout basement, it still can become quite humid and the air in the entire house become damp in the summer. Of course, the more humid the air the more uncomfortable it feels which will cause us to run the air conditioner more than if the air was dry (you know, that ‘humidex’ temperature reading the TV weather folks are always mentioning in the summer at the same time that they give the actual temperature). 

So, when we moved into our current home we purchased one portable dehumidifier and placed it to run in my unfinished workshop room in the basement right next to her room. This unit drains out to the laundry tub. It’s the one on the left in the picture below:

It runs all the time, rarely stopping, from late spring to early fall. So, yes, it will constantly consume electricity.

We had a second portable dehumidifier (the one on the right in the above picture) which we placed in the finished area of the basement containing the billiard table.

For this dehumidifier there is no drain connection, so every day from late spring to early fall we have to remove the interior bucket collecting the water from the moist basement air and take it outside to dump the water onto the lawn (as least we are reducing our water consumption a little).

It too runs almost non-stop from late spring to early fall.

Sure, we see about this time of the year newspaper and Internet ads about portable dehumidifiers.

Some might even be ENERGY STAR rated.

However, there’s a reason why they tend to run constantly in many homes such as ours, even where we have two of them. It is because their capacity is not for a fair sized house.

Our bungalow is approximately 1,700 square feet on the main level and the same in the basement. No wonder these two little guys we have been using ever since we moved into our home are not up to the task. The more they run, the more electricity they consume.

Tomorrow we will talk about my first new energy conservation toy for 2009, the ENERGY STAR rated SaniDry dehumidifier. And, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here a side-by-side comparison of both our two former portable dehumidifiers with our new SaniDry. 

Don’t wait until you are in the middle of the season before you take action on reducing your seasonally high utility bills. Deal with a situation before it starts to cost you. Deal with reducing your seasonally high air conditioning bills now before the high heat and humidity has arrived like an unwanted relative staying over for weeks without end. This is the approach we are taking to deal with reducing the high humidity.

Until tomorrow.

To continue to the next article in this series about our new dehumidifier, simply select this link to Part 2.