You have the analog equivalent of a unit I hacked. Mine was a whirlpool gold model. I inherited it at work: they used two of them to keep the powder paint booth bone dry. They ran all the time, forever. As preventive maintenance, one was replaced every six months.
Under the skin, these units are basically a 5000 BTU air conditioner with smaller heat exchangers. The metering device is a capillary tube, sized for a walk-in cooler. They are designed so the evaporator starts to frost up after 15 minutes or so of compressor run time if there is moisture to pull out of the air. A defrost thermometer senses when the evaporator is somewhat blocked with frost and stops the compressor while the fan keeps running. The frosty evap coil continues to dehumidify while the captured frost melts and drains off. When all the ice melts, the coil warms back up. The defrost thermometer then tells the compressor when to turn on again.This defrost function saves lots of watts during a normal run.
These units (ge, whirlpool, kenmore, hotpoint, Frigidaire, etc.) are beasts. They're built much more like the old stuff that was brown, much more durable than the newer, white colored plastic stuff is. I put an expansion valve in mine to make it move twice as much heat as it used to, rigged it a dozen different ways to run experiments, and tortured it mercilessly for days on end, and it still works just fine. Last year, it got turned back into a dehumidifier and kept the dank out of the basement.
naked shots of the unit
Please let us know if the box fan helps dry your clothes faster or not. With the amount of air your unit moves, it would seem to be a waste of electricity to me.