Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox
I'm most interested in how you seperated the closed loop from itself to make it exhaust into the basement and also suck from the basement.
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Path of least resistance! I left the filter in the furnace but took the side off the furnace and duck taped a new filter to the side of the furnace to filter the incoming air, so it doesn't pull 100% of the air from the basement, but it's less work for it to pull basement air then it is to pull air from the cold air duct work, I then just left the basement door open and you can feel the draft if you stand in that door way!
I thought about doing something to move more air around the basement, but the dehumidifier is already blowing air around and it takes a while for that to catch up so I figured that it was doing a enough to keep air moving.
The window A/C unit that we ended up borrowing is working really well, it dehumidifies more then it cools and it only takes a few hours to dry out the air in the upper part of the house to 35% to 40% so I'm wondering if it is even worth moving the air from the basement up in to the rest of the house.
A/C unit draws 1,200 watts and dumps all the heat outside while cooling and drying the air inside, seems to drop the humidity by about 20% per hour (not documented, just a guess).
Basement Dehumidifier draws 600 watts while running with the compressor on and drys the air by 15-20% per hour when brought to the main floor of the house.
Furnace fan has a 1/4 or 1/3hp motor and also draws alot of power, not sure how much but I will find out next time I have a clamp on amp meter handy.
So what we are thinking is, this fall when window A/C units go on sale we will look for something like the Haier model that has an EER (energy efficiency rating) of 12 EER while energy star is anything over 9.4 EER, I would then be tempted to install it on either a timer or a humidistat so that it turns off once the humidity is down to a set level in the house, goal being to dry the house out when it's hot and humid, not to get it to feel like a walk in cooler, of course it also seems best to run any sort of A/C at night, when it's cooler and the humidity is at it's all time highest, as the heat is transfers in to air is improved with humidity.