De-humidifiers

[Phil Robson]

Winter is coming on & I've a few projects to undertake (all P6 of course ).

My garage's heating is minimal, but I've been wondering about getting a dehumidifier & would be interested to hear of others' opinions. I thought the cold damp chill may be removed, which would make leaving the living room a bit easier! My garage is a double with cavity walls, but a rather large pitched roof space with limited insulation. It is not perfectly sealed but reasonably draught-proof. Keeping the air dry should benefit the cars, although my daily car does get wet from time to time.. :cry:

 

[webmaster]

Phil, I've got one in my garage, I don't use it all the time, just when the weather gets really wet, just helps to keep the moisture levels down and helps to prevent rusting on exposed metal / tools etc..

A little bit of heating would also help, how about plaster-boarding the rafters to keep some heat in, and can also make it brighter. Not as big a job as it sounds, and plaster board is cheap.

Also, is your garage attached to the house ? if so how about fitting a radiator in there (assuming you have central heating), it will help to take the edge off the cold and you could always close the valves to turn it off.

 

[Phil Robson]

The garage is seperate from the house so I can't put a radiator in it off the house.

I'm thinking of putting a false roof in with twinwall plastic or similar at the beam level, but this might have fire / H&S implications. :?

 

[V8P6B]

You have to be very careful when choosing dehumidifiers, ones that use compressors will not dry the air at cold temps. I've got one of These in my garage, it uses a silica gel disc, no compressor, and it also throws out a little bit of warmth. It will work effectively down to 1 deg C, whereas ones with compressors, the performance is said to drop off rapidly below 15 deg C! I'm very pleased with mine, my garage is usually very damp, and was at about 95%-100% humidity (I have a sensor in there connected to my weather station, yes, I know I'm an anorak!) but this dropped to about 65% with the dehumidifier on last winter, when the temp in the garage was about 3 deg C. The humidity never went above 70% with it on. It also has a few settings, you can select what humidity you want, and it'll run until it reaches the humidity level you want, then go to standby. It wasn't cheap, but really does the job. It does use a bit of power though, but no worse than one with a compressor. I can strongly recommend this product.