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Is the Meaco DD8L desiccant dehumidifier better than the popular Arete One or Arete Two compressor models? In this unboxing and first impressions review, I explain why desiccant technology is the secret to removing moisture in cold rooms, garages, and conservatories. I walk you through the entire control panel, demonstrating the automatic louvre, laundry mode, and the ionizer feature. Crucially, I perform a real-time wattage and power consumption test to show exactly how much electricity the DD8L uses compared to compressor units. If you're struggling with winter condensation or damp in unheated spaces, this dehumidifier might be your "keeper."
THIS dehumidifier is DIFFERENT! (Meaco DD8L desiccant dehumidifier review...)
TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!
Hello. This is the Meaco DD8L desiccant dehumidifier. And oh my goodness, it sounds like a character from Star Wars. And it it looks a bit like one, too. If you're new to dehumidifiers, this might be something worth considering. If you've watched my channel before, you'll know that. Oh, by the way, it's 8.7 kg, so I can carry it unlike my other dehumidifiers. But I started on this by actually buying a Meaco Arete One 18L dehumidifier from Costco. And it changed my life. It changed the house. And it to some extent it changed this YouTube channel as well because Meaco got in touch and sent me another dehumidifier, the Arete Two. These two dehumidifiers are compressor dehumidifiers. This one is different. It's called the DD8L because the DD stands for desiccant dehumidifier. And the 8L refers to how much water extracts in a day at a certain temperature or certain humidity. It's just a way of us being able to compare different models. And the thing with this one, I believe, is that because it's a desiccant dehumidifier, it means you can put it in colder places. And while the other dehumidifiers can cope with cold rooms, this one's really built for it, it removes water more efficiently, apparently at lower temperatures. The tradeoff, I think, if you're trying to decide which one to go for is that this one uses more energy, more electricity than the other compressor dehumidifiers like the Arete One and Two. But on the upside, it copes with colder conditions more efficiently. And it also blows out nice warm air from the top from this louvre, this automatic louvre that opens up to protect the the little grille here where the air comes out. So, I have bought dehumidifiers and made videos about them on this channel. Meaco have very kindly supplied this DD8L, but they've asked for nothing in return. This pretty much as unbiased as it can get because I'm comparing this against something I actually paid money for. Let's open up the box and see how the dehumidifier is presented. It's all nice and cardboard. There's a a UK plug. What's this? Oh, what's this? A mystery filler thing, which I'm sure will be clear in a moment. And inside is the DD8L dehumidifier all wrapped up in cloth. How nice. Now, I think I need to be careful in lifting the dehumidifier out of the box. It's not like the compressor dehumidifier where you had to be really super careful and let it settle I think for 8 hours. I still want to be careful with getting it out of the box. So, I'm just lifting it carefully onto the table. And just look at it in the shroud. Let's lift the shroud. Let's big reveal of the Meaco D8L Pro desiccant dehumidifier. Welcome to the Dad Delivers vlog home. Let me give you a closer look. Go to the side. So, we've got some packing tape that holds the water tank in place for transit. So, I'll take those off. And another one for the air filter at the back. Now, if you haven't used a dehumidifier before, I'll give you a... a tour of all the bits and pieces, but we've got a water tank here. It stores 2L. And this is where the first bit of confusion comes with dehumidifiers because it says 8 litres, but that 8L refers to how many litres of water it removes in a day under certain temperature and humidity. It's a way of comparing dehumidifiers. The storage tank holds 2L. And I think the way you empty it is you can just you just pour it. And that just slides in like that. Clunk. At the back it comes with a filter. This grille slides out to reveal the fan is obviously is inside there. And this filter just blocks particles from getting into the fan. There's no removable filter, which is actually good news for me cuz it means I don't have to buy any in the future. But what is good is that you can just hoover this filter from time to time as dust particles will block it up. So the way it works is that damp air, the humid air is drawn in through the filter. Okay, this is pushing my dehumidifier knowledge to to the limit. Uh but it's there's a desiccant inside rather than uh just a compressor and that desiccant takes moisture out of the air. That air is then heated up and condensed and goes into the water bucket and dry air is blown out of the output, the extract fan there. And there's a louvre to direct the air as well. And I think this is automatic. We'll see when we turn it on. And we've got Oh, satisfying moment. There we go. Got the protective film. It's mine. And there's a really stylish uh flat touch screen display there, which will appear when we turn it on. Around the back, this thing that came with the packaging is a cable tidy. And I think all I need to do is push it in. And then when you're not using it or you want to wrap up the excess cable, you can wrap it around here. And if you don't want it, you can easily just push the clips and it comes out, which is really handy. So actually that would be really good for my other dehumidifiers. So I'm pleased with that. There's also this uh outlet here if you wanted to run it for continuous operation. So not using water tank. There's a hose attachment that comes with the water tank. And I think you put that in here and you can... you can attach a hose and just have it pump out into a sink or a bigger place to take the water. I don't do that. I just empty the the water tank. But this is a really good option to have if you want to just leave it running somewhere like a garage. Do you want to see it in action? I think you want to see it in action, don't you? I'm going to turn it on outdoors. The dehumidifier is plugged in and let's bring you closer to the control panel. I think to turn it on you have to touch it on the touchpad in a very particular place and it's the uh there is a power switch here uh but you can't see it obviously because it's off but you can see uh kind of a highlight there and look the louvre is opening and closing. I don't know if you can see that it's saying feed me or give me water Seymour! I think I can control the louvre though with this button here. Let's try out... So, I've got greasy fingers from my lunchtime gyoza. Hey, there we go. Is it opening? Look at that. You... You can control the louvre. And it opens and closes. And I think this causes nice waves of warm air that might help to dry laundry. I'll press it one more step again. It goes three steps. Oh, my fingers. Look at that. There we go. Right. So, now I've got it in laundry mode with louvre opening to the maximum. You can see it just opening. Casper's not sure about this. What do you think? Oh, you brought me a shoe. Thank you. That's really helpful. This is just a first impressions unboxing video. We'll get a better idea of how it sounds indoors. Let me give you a full tour of the control panel of the DD8L. So, to get started, we have the power button right there. Press it once to turn the machine on. You'll hear that beep and the louvre, which is this flap thing on here, will open up automatically. Working our way from the left hand side of the control panel, we have the fan speed button, and you can toggle this between three settings. So, it's this button here. Low for quiet operation, which is great for night time and sleeping. We could put it on medium. So that's two drips on the fan speed indicator there. That's for normal daily use. And then I could put it on to high for maximum extraction. That's good for when we have laundry or a really serious damp problem. The big button, I'm going to turn this down to low because that will make it a lot quieter for me to speak. The target humidity button is this big water drop here. And this sets our target level. So instead of numbers, Meaco uses this kind of grid here. And it it goes from high to low. That kind of hurts my brain slightly because I'm used to going left to right... from low to high. But 95% humidity is at this end of the scale and 35% humidity is at this side of the scale. So humidity is measured as a percentage. And when my room, my house is really damp, it's usually up in the... the mid to high 80s here. Now, helpfully, Meaco have given us a target level. You can see the little heart symbol here of 55. So, 55% is a good level of humidity. We can see in the room right now, my poor daughter's bedroom is running at about 67%. It's roughly between the 65 and the 70 there. And as the room gets drier, these bars will start to fill up and show a lower level towards the 55 mark. We can change the target humidity. So the target humidity has been set for 55% because it's got that ring around it. If I press the big water droplet target humidity button, it's put it into... So it's put it into auto. If I press it again, it's changed the target humidity from 55 to 50. If I press it again, it works its way all the way down. And if I press it again, the ring goes to this infinity sign, which means it's just going to run and run and run. So, there isn't a target humidity for it to aim for. It's a bit like a thermostat, isn't it? So, 70%, well, we're under 70%. So, it will stop dehumidifying because we're under the target. I'm going to press it again just to take it back to a target of 55%. I hope that makes sense. It is a bit confusing at first, but you'll see over time that the indicator will show that the room is getting drier and it reminds you... it says wet and dry at each end of the scale. Here, the timer button is here. You can set this to turn the machine off automatically. And this is great if you want to dry some laundry while you're out, but don't want it running all day. Next up is the ionizer button. This button here. And pressing this turns on the air cleaning feature, which releases negative ions to help trap dust and allergens in the air while it dehumidifies. So, it doesn't have an air filter, but it does have the ionizer feature. A nice safety feature uh which isn't showing here at the moment is that there is an indicator that comes on when the tank is full of water. What happens is the machine will just stop working automatically until the water tank is emptied. We also have a dedicated louvre button. So louvre is a very uh posh word for the flap that's here. You can choose how you want the flap to to cycle through. So setting one is wide swing for press it once.
I'm not sure you can even see it on camera, but the louvre... the flap is opening up and down on a... a much lower setting than it can go. If I press it again, it opens up to a medium setting. The fan went down there. That's nice. And then I'll press it again and the flap, the louvre will open all the way and it will close again. There is a laundry button. I never use the laundry button on my other dehumidifiers, but let me press it anyway to show you. So, it instantly goes into high power. You can see the t-shirt button, the t-shirt icon is circled here. So, that's 35% target humidity, I believe. And you can see the flap is going all the way open and closed. And it set the timer automatically for 6 hours. I don't really use it. I just set the dehumidifier to a low target humidity like 40 or 45 and just leave it running. And the dehumidifier then dehumidifies the room as well. It has a night mode. So we can press the the night button here, the moon icon, and that turns the display off. So, if you want it to run quietly in the room, it's a lower fan speed. The louvre still opens, which is very nice. Let's put it permanently open there. So, it just leaves the flap open. You can probably hear it's still running at that lower fan speed. This question always comes up on all of my dehumidifier videos. I always get a comment saying, "How much power does it use?" I'm going to plug in this monitor that measures how many watts a device is using. This is really unscientific. Your mileage will definitely vary. And it's showing 46W. Now, obviously, this is going to be different for every setting on the dehumidifier. And it's also going to be different what temperature your room is, what you want the target humidity to be. So, let's take that down low. I'll put it on full power. Wow, that's quite impressive. There you go. 488 watts. Let's manually set it on to the highest level. Let's see if that changes the number of watts. Yes, quite impressively, it is now 700 W. So, just bear this in mind that it does use a lot more power. Just to give you a comparison, my 12L Arete Two uses about 145 watts. So, this is quite a lot more than 140W, but this is full power. Let's put it onto uh the gentle mode. So, I'm manually putting it onto the... the one drip there, and it's a much more modest 261W. So, you can see how these different settings really affect how much power this uses. On the upside, the air coming out of here is nice and gently warming. If you think of it almost as a cheap heater, that's good. If you're drying laundry, it's going to be much cheaper than using a tumble dryer. And that's what we've found. So, some other things to take into account. This is just first impressions from having just opened it. I might put it down because it is much lighter than my other dehumidifiers, but it's still 8kg. You can get casters for the bottom to slide it around the room. I think those are optional and you can get them from Meaco. The feature that I like the most is the most understated one, and that's this handle under here. The other dehumidifiers I have... have a... a handle that pops up out of the top. Because this unit is lighter, you can actually lift it up with this special hand grip lip at the back. And you can do it one-handed as well. I am calling this a dad delivers success! What do you think? Say hi in the comments. And also, there's a link down in the description to where you can buy one of these, plus links to all my other videos about dehumidifiers. Thank you for saying hi and hitting the thumbs up or the subscribe button. It really helps me to keep this channel going and help people to find these videos. So, thank you. And right here are all my other dehumidifier videos, so you can see how this compares with everything else.
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