AprilAire E80 Pro 80 Pint Dehumidifier for up to 4400 sqft

Works great dehumidifying my crawl space. It was kind of expensive but hopefully it will prove itself reliable long term. Unit is fairly quiet, can barely hear it running usually. The WiFi feature is pretty cool, can look at the run time and change the humidity setting from my phone. DIY hanging kit was solid and straight forward to use. Installing the unit overall was definitely a bit of challenge but doable. Took a bit to figure out how to wire the sump pump to the dehumidifier so the overflow protection switch worked. Connecting the unit to WiFi was standard for similar devices. I ran a couple feet of the 3/8” tubing provided from the included condensate pump up to the floor rafters, made a loop to create a p-trap and then connected it to 3/4” PVC and ran that the rest of the way towards the foundation and drilled a hole through the foundation and the pipe drips out from there into a gravel “river bed”.

I bought this after my 6 year old Honeywell TruDry 90 developed a refrigerant leak and spewed oil into the condensate tray and drain. Shame on Honeywell. They should know better and be able to build something that lasts longer than 6 years for that kind of money. My house's A/C system lasted 20 years! Since the reviews were even worse than I expected for a new similar replacement Honeywell unit, I did a hard pass and started looking at Aprilaire. The Aprilaire E080 I chose is a nicely built unit and kudos for being a USA manufacturer. They took the time to really insulate it with tons of Styrofoam panels inside with this particular model. Apparently, the E080 is their only really well insulated unit at this moment out of their product lineup. They also had a beast of a support shipping bracket for the compressor strapped to the backside, which saved my unit from damage since the people who load boxes onto the trucks at Amazon's warehouses can't seem to understand what those large "THIS END UP" warnings printed on the boxes mean. Mine was sitting in the truck on it's backside, compressor on the bottom. I kept the box, support bracket and straps (even though they say to throw them out) if I ever have to ship this unit back for repairs/replacement in the future. A note to buyers. DO NOT THROW OUT those Styrofoam inserts that are placed inside the plastic duct collars for this unit. They are for noise reduction, not prevention of shipping damage, so keep them inside the collars when installing. I also moved the control panel to the front to keep it from getting dusty in my basement and thus scratching the clear display panel when being cleaned. Once the unit had sat for a couple of days, I put it up on my leveling pallet that keeps it off the basement floor, swapped the rear collar to the top of my unit and attached it to my overhead duct to distribute the exhaust away from the unit and out into the room and hooked it up to my drain. It fired right up when I turned it on. Soon it starting dumping water into the drain like crazy. This unit has an interesting method of operation. It doesn't work like my old Honeywell unit did, although I suspect that if I had an external humidity controller like my Honeywell unit did, it would probably be similar. But since this unit has the controller/humidistat mounted on the front, what it does is first turn on the fan for 3 minutes to sample the air humidity. After that 3 minutes, if it detects that the humidity in the room is higher than the set point on the control panel, it then turns on the compressor to dehumidify. Even though my basement was already at 48% (according to my probably inaccurate little hygrometer), this was a test and it ran until it hit 3% below my set point of 53% and turned off. Since the room was already dry enough, it did not need to dehumidify again. What this unit does is sample the air every hour, so you'll hear the fan turn on for 3 minutes during those times. If the humidity is below the set point, the fan then turns off and the compressor stays off until the next cycle. I'm hoping this run procedure works when my basement starts getting really humid in the spring and fall. Winter, it's generally not needed and only sometimes in the summer. If once an hour doesn't work out, I'll purchase the add-on external Aprilaire controller, but I suspect it will work great as currently set up. Now if it lasts longer than 6 years, I'll be a happy camper. Given that my local HVAC company does not know much about dehumidifiers in my area, I probably know more about them than they do at this point. They sold me the original Honeywell unit and weren't even sure how to set it up. THEY had to read the manual just to figure it out. They certainly couldn't fix it when the coils finally sprung a leak a few months ago. It's now deemed non-repairable and has to be discarded or recycled. I've also repaired it on my own at least once, when the defrost thermostat failed, which was a known issue at the time. Research saved me a big call charge, even under warranty, and getting a repair person who probably knew nothing about the unit to even diagnose it in the first place.

I recently improved the insulation and sealing of my northern NC home. I contacted with an insulation specialist who removed the insulation between the ceiling and the attic, then sprayed a thick layer of open cell foam under the roof, on the gable ends, and between the floor and the top of the sealed crawl space. They also installed an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) in the crawl space. The ACH50 blower door test result was about 2 after this work. For context, a passive house is required to get below 0.6. anything below 5, and they recommend an ERV. Below 3, you definitely need an ERV. A typical untreated American house might be in the 8-10 range. I was happy with this result. To get better, I think I'd probably have to take off all the siding and re-wrap / re seal, which would be rather expensive. The side effect of this enhanced sealing was that the humidity level in the house went way up (around 65%), so I purchased the Aprilaire unit. After initial install, the humidity dropped fairly quickly to about 50%, but with the unit running 24/7 it seemed to stall out at that number. Over the next 3 weeks, however, the humidity continued to drop to as low as 40% as well the dampness that had gathered in the house sponged out. If you're shooting for a significant drop in humidity, be patient. Don't assume that the initial stall out humidity level will be all you're going to get. As one of the other reviewers commented, the 'up to 4400sq ft' statement is probably for a relatively dry northern zone. If you're in a really humid southern USA environment, you will probably need a bigger unit if your house is over 2000 square feet of conditioned space. It's probably about the right size for my well sealed 1500 sq ft home to control between 45% and 50% in the main living space. For a 3000 sq ft place, or perhaps smaller if it is less well sealed, I think I'd want to purchase a 140 pint per day unit instead of this unit's 80 pint per day capability. My next issue was that the company that installed the dehumidifier and model 76 controller (not the same as the company that did the rest of the work), set and wired the unit in remote mode. This means that the system was controlling to the humidity level at the unit in the crawl space, not the panel in the living space. This meant that the controlled humidity reported at the panel was about 55% while the actual humidity in the main living space was down at 40%. This meant that the dehumidifier was burning a lot of unnecessary energy. After swapping a few emails with the extremely helpful tech support people at Aprilaire, I was able to rewire the stem and set the E080 in 'external' mode. Reconfiguration was an initial problem until I was told to press 'mode' a couple more times after disabling remote mode and enabling external mode to get to 'done', where the unit writes the changed configuration to non volatile memory. Now it's controlling on the humistat in the model 76 controller. The humidity reported by the model 76 matches reasonably closely the level reported by my Nest thermostat, and the dehumidifier will cycle between 46% and 50% (burning a more reasonable amount of energy that the previous configuration).

Using this to handle humidity in a 3300 sq./ft. home. 50% of the house was built in 1918 and the other in 2006. We recently installed hardwood flooring on the entire first floor. This unit was needed to maintain a very specific relative humidity so the floor doesn’t swell and contract with moisture variations that were not manageable with the furnace and AC alone. This unit sit in our basement and drains directly to a floor drain. This can be installing directly into the duct work but I did not use that option. Within 24 hours of installing, the relative humidity was pulled down to our target 52-55%. Runs quiet and efficiently. My new floor will be trouble free from now on.