Best dehumidifiers, sorted by the decision you are making

Why there are thirty lists and not one

Every publisher in this category runs a single ranked list called something like best dehumidifiers, and every one of them is quietly answering a different question than the reader asked. A 50-pint machine that wins on a basement page is a bad recommendation for a bedroom, because at 488 W and a compressor cycling every few minutes it is loud, and the room does not need that much water removed. A silent thermoelectric unit that suits a wardrobe is a catastrophic recommendation for a basement: it removes about one pint a day against the 50-pint unit's fifty.

So the lists here are split by the decision. Pick the one that matches your room, or if you already know the capacity you need, pick the one that matches the number.

Three things that decide the purchase, in order

1. 1Where the water goes. This is first because it is the constraint that cannot be fixed later. A unit with no pump drains downhill or not at all. If the only drain in the room is a laundry sink four feet up a wall, a gravity-only machine is a bucket you empty twice a day forever. Pump versus gravity is the decision, and it is worth making before you look at a single price.
2. 2The DOE pint rating, not the number on the front of the box. Since June 2019 dehumidifiers have been tested at 65F rather than 80F, and ratings fell by roughly 25 to 30 percent on identical hardware. Some listings still lead with a saturation figure measured at 95F and 90% RH - one crawl space unit on this site is sold as 113 pints and certified at 36.33. The pint rating, explained.
3. 3What it costs to run. A 50-pint unit averages 488 W. Twelve hours a day at the US average residential rate is about $1.07 a day, or $32 a month. A 32-pint unit at 318 W over the same hours is about $21. Over a damp season the gap is larger than the price difference between the two machines. Work out your own number.

What we are not doing on these pages

We have not tested any of these units. There is no chamber, no power meter, no sound meter, and no shelf of returned boxes in a garage. Publications that do have those things - Reviewed, HouseFresh, RTINGS - are worth reading and we link them where their work is relevant.

What we do instead is read the manufacturer documentation for every unit we cover, pull each model's certified capacity and Integrated Energy Factor out of the ENERGY STAR product list, compute what the machine actually draws, and show the arithmetic. That is a real, reproducible piece of work, and it produces a number - average watts - that almost nobody in this category publishes at all. It is also checkable: every figure on this site names its source and you can redo the sum yourself. How we pick.

Prices, and why some of them say Check price

Prices on this site come from a live data layer that is refreshed daily, and every price renders with the date it was verified. When a price is older than 48 hours it disappears and the button reads Check price on Amazon instead. That is deliberate. A stale price is worse than no price, because a reader who sees a number treats it as a fact, and the one thing this site sells is that its numbers are facts.

We earn a commission when you buy through a link here, at no cost to you, and that commission never decides a ranking. Where a cheaper unit is the better buy it goes first. The full disclosure.