Humidex Dehumidifiers - Get a Humidex or Dehumidifier?
Probably many of you want to find a good way to solve the moisture problem in your basement, and that is why you are here reading articles to learn more about dehumidifiers. For those of you who do spend time doing your research, you would find a product called Humidex which is also claim to help solve your basement moisture problem. You may probably wonder whether or not you should spend extra dollar to get a Humidex instead. You are lucky to have found AirDehumidifier.com, because we have already done the research for you so that you don’t have to spend 2-3 hours finding information on Google or Yahoo! Here is our view on this Dehumidifier vs. Humidex debate:
Before we get to the meat of the story, I thing it would be necessary to give you some information about what a Humidex is (just in case you are too lazy to do your research). Basically, Humidex is a ventilation unit that will exhaust the trapped moist, excess humidity or contaminated air to outside through a duct. The air is then replaced by warmer and fresher air from outdoors or upper level. With the built-in Humidstat, Humidex can continues to remove moist air from the house and replace it with warmer air, which should theoretically lower the relative humidity.
According to both the experts and the users experience, using Humidex is 90% less expensive to run than a dehumidifier because it consumes only 38 watts of electricity, which should on average cost you $2 a month on your electric bill. What’s more powerful is that it can act as a whole house dehumidifier to dehumidify your basement, crawl space and upper levels.
It sounds good, doesn’t it?
Even though it is much cheaper to run a Humidex than a dehumidifier, the upfront cost of a Humidex is approximately 7 times than the price of a dehumidifier. A fully installed Humidex costs from $1500 to $1800. Even if you don’t mind using a second hand Humidex, the installation cost alone by local installer should cost you around $250, which already allows you to get a brand dehumidifier online plus shipping. You really need to do you own math to see if buying a Humidex is a smart choice.
Moreover, if the humidity ratio of the air outside your house is higher than the ratio inside, lots of moist air is added to the house and it will result in an expensive electric bill. There is no doubt that when the air outside is dry, Humidex is doing a good job keeping the moisture down. However, there is “NO guarantee” that it will perform as well when the outside air is no longer cold or dry. That means the ability of Humidex, as an air exchanger, to reduce humidity in your house depends highly on the condition outside of your house. If a salesperson comes to you telling you that it is the only way to solve your year-round moisture problem, chances are s/he is trying to ripped you off. In order to drain the moistuer air in your house, which is NOT a function of Humidex, you still need a dehumidifier.
Notice that I am NOT saying Humidex doesn’t work. It does help you to lower the humitidy in your house. What I am trying to point out is that it is hard to tell whether a dehumidifier or Humidex will better suit your needs. You really have to do your own math to see which option is better for your house.
Here is what a happy customer said about Humidex:
“I had a humidex in my last home and it does what it says. My basement
was as dry as it was when I was using a dehumidifier, however, my
electric bill was much lower with the humidex.”
Are you willing to pay more upfront so that you can have a lower electric bill in the future? That is the question you should be asking yourself.
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should meet his/her requirement. Both dehumidifiers have the auto defrost and auto restart capability, and they can shut off automatically when the water container is full. For the Comfort-Aire BHD-301dehumidifier, it will alert you with an audible 3 beeps in addition to a full indicator shown on the panel. To control the humidity of the room, you will first have to have a desired humidity level in mind (e.g. 35%) before choosing that setting manually on the panel. Once you are done with the setting, the built in humidistat will do the work for you automatically. There is also an option that will allow you to attach a drainage line to the unit and allow gravity to feed the water out of the unit, so that you can run the dehumidifier for a long time. 
