12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
40 pint, No Auto Restart, Cycles on and Off
Date of Review: Aug 2, 2007
The Bottom Line: No auto restart means you can't put a external timer on it. It will cycle off and on ad infinitum.
This unit does remove the water from the air, at least in my 900 SQ FT home. However, like all units in this price range, it's noisy. Also, like all units in this price range, the compressor cycles off and on continuously, like every 3 minutes, regardless of the humidity level. So if you have it set to 50%, and the room is 50%, it will still cycle off and on, wasting TONS of energy. It takes my house about an hour to creep up from 50% to 55%, and that means the unit should only come on about once an hour, and stay on for around 15 minutes, which is about how long it takes to draw the humidity down to 50%. I've tested Kenmore (Sears), Whirlpool, and Comfort Aire. All do the same thing. Can you imagine how much power this wastes?
I own another house about the same size and bought a 1100.00 Santa Fe that is about 850 watts. However, that unit pulls the house down from 68% humidity to 49% in 12.5 minutes. Then it shuts off until the room gets around 55%, which takes about 45-60 minutes. When it comes on, it takes about 3-4 minutes to pull the room down to 50%--AND SHUTS OFF! So I can run this 800 watt units for about 20% of the cheaper units simply because it is more efficient and actually SHUTS COMPLETELY OFF when it should.
The lower end units are rated as Energy Star, but I bet that is when the unit is actually running, and it is not tested by the EPA in real life instances. If they were, I'll bet they would be rated as energy wasters maxi-mus. It's heart breaking to think that even today, business, and even our own EPA don't really give a crud about the environment.
