Dry-lining a shed

Workshop. It's going to be intermittently used, and with a dehumidiifer in there. I'm hoping the internal moisture load will be significantly less than for a habitable room.

Reply to
Andy Dingley
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from Andy Dingley contains these words:

You'll need heating as well as the dehumidifier, or the coils of the dehumidifier are likely to freeze. Some dehumidifiers have heaters built in.

Reply to
Appin

In a small, insulated volume, I'm assuming the waste heat from the dehumidifier will be sufficient.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

I'd concur on that one - keeps our 1st floor bearably warm in winter, plus (as I'm sure you know) the dehumidifier should be defrosting it's own coils as part of normal operation....sounds good to me.

JimK

Reply to
JimK

It'll defrost them, but AIUI the ideal (i.e. more efficient) operating cycle of the dehumidifier is with cycles short enough that it doesn't build up a frost layer. The frost layer has low conductivity, so operating any longer than this is consuming power to make colder ice on the inside of the frost, rather than doing the minimum amount of work, that of producing liquid water droplets on the coils, just barely below their dewpoint.

One of my dehumidifiers blew up last year (choked with sawdust and overheated) and killed its cycle timer. I've now replaced this with an adjustable timer. In My Copious Free Time, I was planning on playing with adjusting this for minimum frost and measuring the power consumption / water capture. I've even heard of people using a reflectivity measure (white frost over dark coils) to run on "until it frosts", rather than a fixed time.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

The message from Andy Dingley contains these words:

I've got four of them running in various locations. Since it doesn't cost significantly more to have limited heating capacity built in, and since you need to ensure that the temperature's high enough to allow cooling without freezing the coils, and since the heating capacity won't be used unless needed, it seems to me to make sense to have the heating capacity. YMMV

Reply to
Appin

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