Dehumidifiers, Crawl Space, CleanSpace

For many around North America the hot, humid, days of summer are upon us and we wanted to take a moment to revisit some facts around our business. When we are addressing a homeowner's concern in their basement or crawl space, there are many things that are common.

They called us out to see them, that is an important part of the process. There are four sales we must make with each customer. They need to agree to fix their problem, fix it right, fix it with us, and fix it now.

Is it complicated? Is it simple? Well, that’s up to you. When you use all the tools at your disposal and present all the product options to the homeowner, your job gets easier.

It gets harder when we pre judge the situation, or maybe we have another appointment in an hour, or we are having a bad day, or we want to get off work early today, or its too hot, or whatever, you know what I mean.

We make it harder than it has to be, it’s a lot easier if you follow the program step by step. Not like a robot, but you can see how the presentation is falling on the homeowner and adjust the time you spend on each part of the presentation. People buy from people, and they buy from people they like.

Ok, so back to hot and humid summers. Let’s take the SaniDry units for example. Yes they are a dehumidifier, and yes they are an air scrubber also. But they are much more than that. They are also what is referred in the restoration trade as an LGR. LGR stands for "low grain refrigerant" dehumidifier; this is unlike any big box store dehu. They simply cannot be compared. It is like comparing a whole home air conditioning unit to a window air conditioner and saying that they will get similar results.

There is a two stage filtration system on the SaniDry. There usually are no filters on the big box store units, so it’s safe to say they are not cleaning the air. The filter we use is a Merv 11 Filter. Merv is a rating like HEPA is a rating, but to be “HEPA” like we would have to use a Merv 18 filter. We don’t use the 18 because the filter is so tight, it would restrict air flow too much. The filter we use is the same rated level filter that is used in commercial buildings, like hospitals. It can filter 100% of the particles 2 microns or larger and 50% of the particles 1 micron or larger. So what’s a micron? There are 25,400 microns in an inch! Tobacco smoke, most viruses, pollen, dust mite fecal matter can be filtered out by our system! We also stock an optional carbon activated filter that is great for reducing odors. So no filter compared to commercial grade filtration, are you starting to see the difference?  We are changing the crawl space/basement environment, and we are changing homeowner’s lives. 

The next item that makes the SaniDry special is the heat exchange core. This is a honeycombed plastic filter of sorts that helps make this unit operate in a super-efficient manner. Unconditioned air comes through the top of the unit through our two stage filtration system and vertically into the heat exchange core. Upon exiting the core, the air comes into contact with the cold coil. The cold evaporator coil looks like a small radiator from a car. Once the moist air hits the cold coil it condenses and water starts to drain out of the unit. 

That air is now cold and it gets drawn back horizontally through the heat exchange core and pre cools the incoming air. This in turn drops the temperature quicker of that incoming air and water gets squeezed out and continues to flow out of the machine. The air is forced though the heat exchange core and now hits the hot coil condensor which also looks like a small vehicle radiator. That is the reason the air feels warm when it comes out of the unit, it hits the hot coil and produces dry filtered air to help dry and condition the crawl space. We have said this before; our unit has ten times the cold surface area of other dehumidifiers! 

The blower system is yet another reason why the SaniDry is special. We are able to use a 300 cfm blower. That is a big powerful fan that can circulate the dry air all around, and not only dry the air but building materials too. I said we are able to use a 300 cfm blower. Household dehumidifiers cannot use such a large blower. Why? Well for one it would add greatly to the cost of their unit, but that’s not why. We have the big heat exchange core, the big cold coil and big hot coil, and we can use these all together because of residence time. What is that? In technical terms it is "the capacity of a system to hold a substance divided by the rate of flow of the substance through the system." Bottom line is the more residence time, or time on the cold surfaces, the better the unit will operate. Or removal time, you pick which one you like better. So we have a lot of residence time between the time the unconditioned air enters the SaniDry, hits the heat exchange core, passes over the cold coils, goes back though the heat exchange core, and now it drops the temperature of the exchange core and pre cools the incoming air and lastly gets to the warm coil and gets thrown out into the crawl space with our big blower fan. Wow! We can do all this because of the system The big box stores have a tiny little muffin fan because there is no big cold coils or heat exchange core. They have a thin little curled coil, you have seen them, and there is not much surface area so the temperature never really gets dropped and the units don’t kick out really dry air for very long. In fact those units have a habit of freezing up, or run constantly only to produce an empty bucket. So its really easy to beat up on the other dehumidifiers out there, right?

Let’s talk about the 6.4 amp draw of the SaniDry CX, and 6.75 for the XP. Yes its energy star rated, but the other units out there, well you check out the amps they draw for yourself. There are some close but there are most that consume more power and only get a fraction of the pints per day of water that we can pull out of the air. So to do the same job they may need 4, 5, 6 or more of their units. The fact is that the SaniDry units will also operate at lower temperatures that the other units. So the efficiencies of some dehumidifiers simply stop drying while the blower continues to blow and draw electricity. Yikes.