Daily Home Renovation Tips

Today, we take a look at the unit itself. Here it is installed in our basement with the optional upper and lower duct kits: 

As you know, I like simple. This large unit simply plugs into any electrical outlet.

According to the manual, the unit weighs 110 pounds with the following dimensions:

• Width   - 20 inches
• Height  - 36 inches
• Depth   - 17 inches

It’s ‘energy factor’ is 2.65 liters / kWh.

The units’ water removal, again per the manual, at 80 degrees F and 60% relative humidity is 100 pints per day. The largest capacity I could find at Sears recently was 70 pints per day while at Costco it was a unit for only 60 pints per day.

The unit comes with not one but two air filters.

The grey one on the top (above) is washable.

Whereas underneath the grey washable filter is a white 16 inch X 20 inch X 2 inch fabric filter (pictured above), again according to the manual, is ‘a standard MERV-11 65% efficient pleated fabric filter’. 

Now, it has an absolutely huge cold coil as shown in the picture below taken from the Basement Systems’ web site, with thanks. 

What is the cold coil? It is the component of any dehumidifier which takes the moisture out of the air to make the air less humid, or dryer.

The water leaves the air and goes through a tube through either the drain in the basement floor (the same one that the water from a flow-through humidifier goes into in the winter) or for homes which have a sump pump the water drains through the tube into the sump pump.

Now according to Kevin, one of the employees from Clarke Basement Systems in the GTA area from whom we obtained our unit, 85% of the time customers who purchase the SaniDry dehumidifier from them simply place the unit in an open area of their basement with access to the floor drain or sump pump for the water runoff.

However, 15% of the time, their customers have the unit installed with the upper and lower duct kits as they want to place the unit in an area of the basement away from the main traffic area.

That is what we did.

Next time, we will continue this energy savings series by covering the first portion of the installation of the duct kits for our unit. It’s actually quite easy to do; easier than I had thought. That’s where Kevin, together with Noel and Rob from Clarke Basement Systems comes in. But, that’s for next time.

To continue with this series on our new SaniDry dehumidifier, simply select this link to Part 3 where we start the installation of the upper and lower vent kits.