Should you buy a dehumidifier? Here's our personal experience of how a MeacoDry Arete One 18L dehumidifier completely transforms our home.
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Is a dehumidifier worth the money?
TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
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Should you get a dehumidifier?
If you're in a position where you're asking yourself that question and looking up videos like this, I know exactly how you're feeling because we were in that position exactly one year ago.
And spending about £200 or $250 on one of these seems like an insane amount of money to spend on... on any object, let alone one that just sucks water out of the air.
But, but I've got to say, one month on - a bit of a spoiler, I'm going to jump forward - this is hands down the best thing that we have spent our money on this year! It has completely changed our... how our house feels, how our home feels.
I'm freelance, and at the time, I was between jobs. A.K.A unemployed - it's a nicer way of saying it.
And it felt like there was just no way that I could spend that amount of money on one of these things.
But I'm going to tell you why this has been absolutely the best thing we have bought for our home this year, and I... I'll try and explain how it's changed how our house actually feels over the year.
We had a big problem in our house, uh, it's, it's a really normal two-up two-down, three-bedroom house. My experiences are here in the UK; this I think is only UK-specific, but we had a terrible, terrible mould problem.
The houses in the UK, as you know, are really good and designed to just keep as much heat in as possible, and because of that, they're absolutely terrible for ventilation.
So, we got just enormous mould all around the house in really odd places.
The worst of it was in the hallway. I think I've got some footage here.
This will give you an idea of the mould that we get.
This is the corner of our hallway, and... and, oh my God, this is revolting! This is absolutely disgusting! We... we've had to take down the bags and coats that were here, and behind there, cold air gets trapped.
Because this is the coolest part on the lower floor, water in the air condenses on those coldest places, which just happen to be behind the coats in the, uh, hallway by the front door, and I, I've tried everything!
We've tried opening windows with the heating on. We've tried turning the heating up, running the heating for longer.
I even tried making the walls warmer by putting MDF panels... That just made things even worse, uh, because the MDF then turned into a sponge, which was like the perfect medium for growing mould, it turns out!
And also, if you do make any area warmer, the water just condenses in the next coldest place.
So, you... effectively, you're just chasing the mould around the house every time. It's a bit like whack-a-mole! Every time you get somewhere warmer or more ventilated, uh, it just goes somewhere else.
We also had this brand new kitchen built, and we have fans fitted in here for ventilation, uh, which are part of the building regulations, but I was still finding mould in the corners and even under this new L-shaped bench that I built.
So, chasing the mould around the house wasn't working, turning the heating on for longer wasn't working, airing it more, opening windows, and running the ventilation fans.
We even tried moving the furniture away from the walls to allow the air to circulate.
That didn't work either! It didn't reduce the damp on the walls or the mould.
Even though we couldn't afford it, we knew we had to get rid of the mould.
As you know, this stuff is deadly, uh, black mould is really bad for the lungs, but it turns out, according to a podcast I listened to, with this brain expert, that black mould actually attacks the brain as well!
So, we knew, we knew we had to get one of these, but the dehumidifiers sold out on Amazon and in stores, like John Lewis, uh, at this time of year.
My sister got a Meaco dehumidifier and absolutely raved about using it.
So, when we saw this Meaco dehumidifier in Costco, we grabbed it! This was such an unexpected and huge, sudden expense for us.
I mean, we only went in there to bulk-buy some lemons!
But it felt really good to finally get our hands on one.
This is the Meaco Arete 1 18L dehumidifier and air purifier.
I, I did not think we'd pick up a humidifier today, a dehumidifier!
We came in for some lemons!
And this is it here, this beauty, uh, we got it back, tried it for a month, and I made some videos on that. Those links are down in the description. I've got a full review and unboxing, first impressions of what it was like to use the Arete One.
And it is, hands down, the best thing we have ever bought for this house.
It instantly dropped the humidity in the house, it made the place feel warmer, and for the first six weeks, we were emptying this bucket about once or twice a day!
It was taking out so much water.
After about six weeks, that amount of liquid that it was removing did drop. So, we got the impression that this thing actually dried out the fabric of the house, as well as the furniture and, uh, maybe even the brickwork.
Before then, we had... had a dehumidifier before - it's this thing. It's a Silentnight 1.5L dehumidifier.
We put this in our daughter's bedroom. I made a video about that, and it sort of helped, uh, it was emptying about a litre of liquid a day, but it didn't make the room feel drier, and it certainly didn't get rid of the mould.
It just helped the room feel a bit less humid.
And that was the point where I bought this - it's a cheap hydrometer from Amazon, I'll put a link in the description if you... if you want one of these.
But it actually measures the humidity, the relative humidity as a percentage in the room.
And it was thanks to this that I could see that this little dehumidifier wasn't having much impact at all.
Once the room was drier, just more damp air comes in from the rest of the house to... to replace what this has picked up.
I think these are for a single room or a caravan.
They're not cheap, and knowing what I know now with the big dehumidifier, I would say, "Don't waste your money on this!" I mean, these aren't cheap, but whatever money you'd put into this, you could certainly put into a bigger one.
So, I'm just going to put this to one side.
My advice, for what it's worth, is if you can afford it and if you've got the space, to go as big as possible. So, I've got two units here to demonstrate.
This is the Arete One 18L dehumidifier and air purifier, and this is the Arete Two 12L dehumidifier and air purifier.
Basically, there are two... two sizes. This one is the 10L or 12L one, and this size is for the 18, 20 or 25L.
I feel like I... I need to explain the, the, the litres now.
I thought the litres, the 'L' number, referred to the amount of liquid that the dehumidifier can store, but that's not true at all!
Because the two sizes are, there's a storage bucket here, which is about 2 and a half litres, and this storage bucket, oh, it's got a lot in there! I don't want to pour it over my equipment! And this storage bucket over here is 4.8L.
The litres refers to the amount of liquid that each dehumidifier removes on a really standard setting for one day. So, that setting is, I believe...
...if I can remember it rightly, I'm not an expert, that if you have a room that is 30° centigrade and 80% humidity, then the 12L dehumidifier will remove 12L in one day.
So, at the moment, you can see it's about 17° in here, and the humidity is 69%, according to this. If it were 80% and 30°, then this thing would remove 12L in one day, this dehumidifier would remove 18L in one day.
So you can see, it's... it's almost like 50% more powerful than this one.
That's how I square it in my head.
So, I suppose the next big-, sorry, I feel like I'm crushed between these two, these two objects - it's the only way I could get them both in, uh - the next biggest question I suppose we'd have is, well, do I go for the 10L or 12L dehumidifier or, oh just turned it on, or should I go for a bigger one: 18, 20, 25?
Now, obviously this is, this is up to you... personally. I'd go for the big one if you can afford it and you've got the space, but the great thing with the 10L and 12L models are that they... they're probably more for a... a room or a flat or a problem area.
You can use them for a one to three-bedroom house, and we've been trying this here, and it... it does a good job of extracting liquid from the air.
It's also smaller and quieter, and that might be more onto this one. It's also cheaper as well. The 18, 20, or 25L dehumidifiers, for us, they just feel so much better. They're much more powerful, they dehumidify more quickly, and because you've effectively got almost double the capacity in the storage buckets here, you'd be emptying the bucket kit far less frequently than... than this one.
So, of the two, obviously this is, this is your choice with the cost and the space, but I, I say go big, uh, because this can cope with everything, including laundry, which is, uh, something else that we weren't expecting. I'll... I'll cover that in a moment.
There were a few things that came up that surprised us, living with a dehumidifier for the... for the year. The first was that we were not expecting the air to feel drier!
Even though that's the whole point of this thing, we... we didn't realise it would have such an impact on how the actual air feels in your home.
Because this is removing the excess humidity, it means that it's cheaper and quicker to heat your house. A dehumidifier, obviously, removes the water from the air and makes it less humid, and that means that the air is less dense, and it means it's less heavy.
So it means you need less energy to heat that air, if that makes sense.
And it... it sounds like some kind of physics, uh, theoretical question, but actually, it, you can actually feel it when you've got a dehumidifier running in your home.
So, as well as being cheaper and quicker to heat our house, we've also not had any mould patches this year at all.
Usually, at this time of year, I'd be... I'd be finding new, new and wonderful places where the mould is growing.
It just hasn't happened this year because we've been running it pretty much all year round, but particularly when it's been colder.
We were worried, obviously, about the cost of electricity with... with running this, uh, day long. But the biggest thing we weren't expecting was the huge surprise that we had with the laundry!
I didn't realise that you could dry clothes in a room, uh, pretty much in half a day. So, I've got the washing behind us, if you can see it back there.
It's a normal thing now for us to hang the washing up and to run the dehumidifier.
It takes about half a day to dry a normal load of laundry.
It is so much cheaper than running a tumble dryer and well worth trying if you've got the space and the patience to... to have the... the washing hung up. It's... it doesn't look good, I know, but it is so much cheaper than running the tumble dryer, and uses so much less electricity than a tumble dryer.
The other thing we weren't expecting is that the house just feels warmer.
Because the... the air is drier, even with the heating on, the house feels nicer.
We haven't got our shoulders up around our earholes because the... the radiators heat the house more quickly because the air is less humid.
We tend to leave it on at night in the hallway.
I think this is too loud for a bedroom, uh, your mileage might vary.
I think even the... the 12L is just a tiny bit too loud to actually have in the room with you.
So, we tend to leave these out on the hallway, or we leave it running overnight in a... in a room with the door closed.
The idea of the dehumidifier is that you... you can put it in the hallway, and it dehumidifies the whole house, so long as the doors are open.
Which sounds obvious, but it's worth saying that what happens, the way it works is that this dries the air around the dehumidifier, and then the... the damp air comes to replace that drier air, and it just brings down the humidity in the... in the whole house.
Although we have tried this where we put it in a room and close the door, just to dry out a particular room if the humidity is too high in there.
There are lots of brands to choose from. I paid for the Arete One with my own money.
This is the 18L model. This is the 12L Arete Two. Meaco saw my videos and very kindly gifted us this model so that we could try it out.
I have a whole video, uh, explaining what it's like with the unboxing and how the control panel works, and you can attach an app to it.
It has a... a more groovy display with the graphical interface here, so you can see the humidity more clearly.
So, the Arete Two costs a bit more than the previous model, the Arete One, which you can still buy.
I kind of like the fact that you can see the percentage humidity displayed as a number on the Arete One.
What I didn't like-, what I love about the Arete Two is that it's got this Louvre, it's got this movable flap.
Because the Arete One just has the fan open, I've dropped all sorts into this poor humid- dehumidifier! I don't know how it survived us, but it has. Um, so it's definitely a step forward for the Arete Two to... to have a... a cover flap that you can lift when you're using it.
It just sort of tilts up like that. For me, the extra expense is worth that alone.
The other, uh, extra feature, which is rarely mentioned as well, is that it's around the back. See if I can turn it around without tipping it up. At the back, we have a HEPA filter on each dehumidifier, and then have casters as well, so you can move them around the house. They're not light, so they are quite a thing to carry up and down the stairs if you need to. But at the back, we've got this HEPA filter, and what that does is that it protects the... the fan inside by filtering the air. But the benefit of that is that the air that's pumped out is obviously purified, because it's been through a filter. And during the summer months, you can actually press a button and turn the dehumidifier part of this machine off and just have this as a giant air purifier! Which might be helpful during springtime in hay fever season or, um, just generally during the summertime, to have a nice fan in the house.
Our experience of the... the larger dehumidifier was that it... it sucked out a jaw-dropping amount of liquid in the first six weeks!
It just wouldn't stop, the water wouldn't stop coming!
But after about six weeks, that did calm down.
It now... it now fills up about once every couple of days if we're not using it for laundry.
So, be prepared, when you first get this, for a dehumidifier to feel like it's actually drying out your house for the first time!
Leave me a comment down below if you are thinking of getting a dehumidifier and what you might be going for - whether you'll go for the smaller model or the larger model, or even just the tiny model.
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