Is Ebac dehumidifier smart control really smart?

I've had an Ebac DI-818WG (model 3650e? so probably similar to yours) for several years. Used almost exclusively for drying the laundry in the spare bedroom when it's too wet outside to hang it in the conservatory (my conservatory is more like a lean-to greenhouse attached to the house and accessed from both inside and outside. The laundry would never dry there on wet days). I usually set it on 'laundry' mode (which AFAICS just increases the fan speed) and set the timer for eight hours. When it reaches the end of the time period it will default back to smart mode and appear to tick over on that setting.

My two gripes about it are that it doesn't tell you how long it's still got to run before it reaches the eight hours originally set, and I would like to adjust the humidity myself, as I used to be able to do with a previous dehumidifier (make not remembered) rather than relying on their choice.

But it dries the laundry, so I'll carry on using it until it gives up, at which point I'll look for one with user humidity control.

I bought an Ebac PowerDri a couple of years ago hoping it would be more efficient than my 40-YO Ebac homedry, but despite claiming that it 'works' down to 3C, what happens is that the cooling radiator simply gets bunged up with frost once the temp is below about 15C.

This means there is no airflow, and even worse it has a digital timer that simply turns the compressor off for 5 minutes every hour allowing any frost to melt but below 15C this thawing of the cooling section does not happen !.

My 40-YO ebac homedry has an electro-mechanical valve in the warm refridgerant line and every hour this valve is activated and warm gases pass through the ice-encrusted cooling coils, and the ice quickly melts and is collected in the tank.

No such rapid de-thaw mechanism seems to exist on the Powerdri, so at low temperatures it cannot 'work'. If your house has been flooded during typically colder weather where this device is intended to be used (or drying out plaster etc in a property where heating has not been installed) then definately avoid this model.

I think Ebac objected to 'Which' magazines review of their de-humidifiers. I'll check out the back copies in the library next time I'm in there.

They also objected to the which? reviews on their washing machines and I wish I read them (and found the reviews that were not all glowing praise) before I purchased one. Made in the UK in the same sense that British Leyland made cars in the UK.

Their washing machines have reluctance to spin. They claim a sophisticated out of balance detection which can spend 40 minutes trying to balance a wet load before giving up. The problem with this is that unless it tries to spin little water is removed from the load and a wet load is unlikely to be balanced.

In my experience 1 in 5 loads fail to spin and leave a soaking wet load in the machine. Leave the load a few hours for the water to drain via gravity and then select a spin only program and you will get a proper spin.

Ebac remove all negative reviews from their web site and from any social media advertising comments. Go to TrustPilot and look at the review for their washing machines and the same comments about not spinning are common.

Sigh, that reversing valve is heatpumps 101. That's how you efficiently run defrost cycles, using the energy you just pulled into your warm refrigerant.

It sounds severe cheapskatery that they didn't put it in. Even the £30 Peltier dehumidifier I got from Amazon built up (small amounts of) ice in regular room temperature, so I don't see how they could get away without it. They make a big song and dance about being 'made for the UK climate' but it seems like they live in a different climate to the rest of us.

I think the dessicant dehumidifiers don't need defrost cycles so are better for colder locations, but ebac don't sell those.

Theo

We've had a 'Ruby Dry' for several years. It's a desiccant wheel dehumidifier. Control is pretty much man-draulic. You switch it on, set either fan speed, or select a target humidity level (40% 50% or 60%), and that's it. It doesn't have a timer, and I wouldn't use it on a external timer because when you switch if "OFF" it actually runs through a cool-down phase (lasts two or three minutes IIRC). Some people have claimed Ruby Dry don't last long, but I strongly suspect this is because they just cut power to the unit, and don't allow it to go through that cool-down process.

True, & that's why we bought a desiccant wheel dehumidifier. They do however need to run a cool down process when you switch them off

- which makes them unsuitable to be mated with a plug-in timer.

Having dealt with several desiccant wheel dehumidifiers which have come in to Repair Cafes, my advice would be:

o Never run when unsupervised.

o Never run in a room without a smoke detector.

Common failure mode is desiccant wheel stops turning. Heater then sets fire to it.

Noted with thanks.

What part failed?

I built a new microcontroller for a ~20 year old dehumidifier, which had stopped working because the control board died. The original had provision for doing defrost (temperature sensor on the evaporator, and a defrost indicator lamp), but that never worked, and the evaporator would turn into a block of ice when run below about 15C.

My logic, which I worked out by experimenting, was roughly... When evaporator drops below zero, start a 10 minute timer - the evaporator doesn't block in 10 mins of running below zero. When timer expires, go in to defrost mode which is switch off compressor, but keep fan running. This causes the ice to melt and run out. When the evaporator goes back above freezing, continue defrost mode for

My replacement microcontroller is a first generation Raspberry Pi B, so the dehumidifier is controllable remotely via a web interface, ssh, and a proprietary monitoring and control API which I use for all my environment control projects. I didn't bother implementing local controls on the unit because this added a benefit in this case of no local tampering, although I do drive the original indicator lamps to show what the unit is currently doing. Also, it uses a high precision digital humidity sensor which is much more accurate than the original plastic film humidistat which was on it.

No idea which component was the culprit but all the lights on the control panel were flashing continuously and the fan was pulsing in step with them. This even continued after lifting out the water container which would normally turn it off.

Unlike Ebac's very vague description of the control system, with claims that it learns about the moisture level patterns in the home, Meaco explain that it will cut out when the RH is reduced to 3% below the set target level and will run the fan briefly every 30 minutes to check the RH level and will cut in when it reaches 3% above the target. And this is exactly what it is doing.