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branwen
frankenbike
@Greenbank
What are the symptoms you're trying to treat with the dehumidifier?
We run ours when we start to get condensation on the windows in the sitting room (most other rooms are double glazed). We start to get this in late Sep/Oct as we dry clothes indoors and usually in that room. During the summer months there's no condensation as we can have all of the windows wide open, and clothes indoors dry relatively quickly.
It's a big old house that's been converted into flats with little thought for air circulation, but it's not draughty. We can dry stuff on a line in the garden but it's a faff to get down and round to our bit of the garden and there's only a few weeks of the year where it's better to this in the garden than it is indoors.
The humidifier comes out roughly around the time we start to turn the heating on, and we only ever have to put the humidifier on in the room where the clothes are drying. That keeps the condensation on the single-glazed windows down to a minimum.
You can see this from the temp/humidity graph below. Humidity is generally around 60-70%RH throughout the year, albeit with no humidifier action between April and October. Dropping as low as 50%RH is rare so no point ever chasing that.
Thermostat generally turned to 18 deg C come October time (it sits at ~15 deg C otherwise) and that means the heating is off/on all the way through to April. Thermostat is turned down to 16 deg C at night, and back up to 18 deg C when someone gets up. It's also left down at 15 if we're out for the day or longer (there's at least one of us WFH Mon-Fri so it's kept warm during most of the week).
We make sure we close the bathroom door and crack the bathroom window open after a bath/shower to keep the humid air away from the rest of the flat. Fitting a humidity controlled extractor fan will be on the list for the grand rewiring.
As for running costs, the old rule of thumb was a 1W light bulb on 24/7 for a year would cost £1. So a dehumidifier rated at 140W and on for ~8h a day for 5 months means we're looking at £20/year in old electricity costs, more like £60/year now with current prices. That's a bargain. And any energy the dehumidifier throws out as heat means we use our heating just a little bit less.
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