By Christine Frietchen on May 17, 2010 in
We spend a lot of time looking for the best appliances, but we also look out for the worst. Now we've found them: As a group, dehumidifiers get some of the worst ratings of any group of appliances. Maybe it's a perfect-storm situation -- dehumidifiers combine water, electricity, refrigeration elements and a lot of plastic parts. We couldn't find a single model that doesn't get at least some complaints about water leaks, bad accuracy, or poor durability. Our dehumidifiers report focuses on models that do better than others in reviews, but in the course of our research, we found some real stinkers. Here's what you DON'T want to buy...
Professional reviews are really lackluster for dehumidifiers. Consumer Reports hasn't reviewed them in two years, and Good Housekeeping doesn't have any recent coverage either. So for these products, user reviews are really the best way to find relevant and recent information. Amazon.com is the best general source, but we also found enlightening (and snarky) reviews at Sears.com, AJMadison, the Ace Hardware website, and a handful of others.
Based on what we found, here are some dehumidifiers you might want to avoid.
DeLonghi wins for the worst overall reviews
The DeLonghi DE500P is Energy Star rated, but that's about the only thing it has going for it. Out of 28 reviews on Amazon.com, more than half are 1-star zingers. The big selling feature for this unit is a pump that sucks water out of the collection bucket and into a sink or out a window. The problem? Owners are steamed when the pump gives up, sometimes after a few weeks, sometimes after several months.
The smaller DeLonghi DE400P costs less but also has the pump. It has even more reviews at Amazon.com -- 56 at the time of our visit -- but the same dismal average rating of two stars, and more than half of owners giving it a scathing one-star or two-star rating. The problem? The same pump failures reported for the other model.
Iffy scores for some Kenmore dehumidifiers as well
The 35-pint Kenmore 54351 gets more reviews than just about any dehumidifier we found. However, it also gets some of the most lousy reviews. Fully 74 out of 119 owner-written reviews are one-star rants. Plain-old product failure is the consensus here; for some, the until lasted just a couple of months, but for others, it made it through a couple of seasons. Kenmore now has a new batch of dehumidifier models on its site, but none of them have been reviewed yet.
To be fair, we found at least some complaints about all dehumidifiers; there's not a unit out there that doesn't come in for some criticism. So we looked for models that get pummeled in reviews less frequently than others. Our top picks right now include the Danby DDR7009REE, a unit that takes some licks, but comes out in front of the likes of DeLonghi and Kenmore. A smaller, cheaper pick is the Soleus Air CFM-40E.