How we pick, and what we refuse to claim

What we actually do

The Dry Index launched on 1 September 2026. It has no laboratory, no humidity chamber, no power meter, no sound meter, and no shelf of units in a garage. Publications that have those things are doing work we cannot match, and where their measurements are relevant we say so and link them.

What we do instead is documented, reproducible desk work, and it produces figures nobody else in this category publishes:

• Read the manufacturer documentation for every unit we cover - the listing, the product page, the specification section - and quote what it says with the date we read it.
• Pull each model out of the ENERGY STAR certified product list, a US government open dataset of 551 certified models (527 portable) across 136 brands, and take its published DOE capacity and Integrated Energy Factor.
• Compute the average power draw from those two figures, show the formula, and cross-check it against the annual consumption ENERGY STAR publishes separately.
• Compute running cost at the reader's own electricity rate, using state figures from the EIA rather than a single national number.
• Reconcile the pre-2020 and post-2019 DOE pint labels so a cross-generation comparison is possible at all.
• Track prices daily and render every one with the date it was verified.

The running-cost formula, in full

Almost nobody in this category publishes a dehumidifier's power draw. Of the 21 current units in our registry, one prints a wattage on its listing. The inputs to compute it are public, and the arithmetic is three lines:

Capacity is the model's water removal rate at the post-2019 DOE test condition, 65F and 60% relative humidity. IEF is its Integrated Energy Factor in liters of water removed per kilowatt-hour. Both are published per model in the ENERGY STAR certified list.

The cross-check, because a derivation needs one

A formula that produces plausible-looking numbers is not evidence. Every certified row also carries an annual energy consumption in kWh per year, computed by ENERGY STAR independently of anything we did. Dividing that by the wattage we computed gives an implied annual run time.

Across all 527 certified portable models the median is 1074 hours, with the middle half falling between 1,055 and 1,091. A spread that tight across 136 unrelated manufacturers means the derivation agrees with a figure published separately. It is not a fit and it is not a coincidence.

The ranking criteria, and their weight

Roundups on this site are ordered by these, in this order. It is a deliberate departure from the usual approach of leading with capacity.

• 1. Whether the machine can do the job in your room at all. Drainage first. A unit with no pump cannot move water uphill, and no other specification compensates. This is the only criterion that can make a machine unusable rather than merely suboptimal.
• 2. Certified capacity at the DOE test condition. Never the saturation figure on the front of the box, which in our registry runs from 2.4x to 3.1x the certified rating on the same units.
• 3. Computed average draw, and what it costs. From the certified data where a named entry exists, and stated as a class band where it does not.
• 4. What the manufacturer is willing to publish. A maker that prints a wattage, a pump reach or a minimum operating temperature is telling you something about how it expects to be judged.
• 5. Fallback behavior. Bucket size on a pump model, gravity fallback if the pump quits, warranty term. What happens when it goes wrong.

Price is not on that list, and that is intentional. Price appears on every page as a live figure and it is a factor in the write-up, but it does not set the order - because a cheaper machine that cannot reach your drain is not a better buy at any price.

Sources we accept, and sources we do not

Preferred, cited by name and linked

• Manufacturer specification sheets, manuals and product documentation
• The US DOE dehumidifier test procedure and the standards that flow from it
• The ENERGY STAR certified product list and program criteria
• EIA electricity rate data - currently EIA Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, June 2026
• EPA guidance on indoor humidity and mold

Acceptable with attribution

Retailer listings for live price and availability, and retailer-hosted rating data - always attributed to that retailer, never restated as ours.

Never acceptable

• Another affiliate site's numbers restated as fact
• Aggregator search-volume pages
• Anything from memory
• Any figure whose source cannot be named

What we do when the number does not exist

We say so. Data unavailable is an acceptable sentence on this site. An invented number is not.

Concretely: 7 of the 21 units in our registry map to a named entry in the ENERGY STAR certified list and carry a computed wattage. The other 14 do not, and those pages say so and give the certified class band instead - for a 50-pint unit that is 443 to 490 W across 164 models.

Where a retail model number does not exactly match the certified one - a W1 against a Y1 suffix, a color wildcard, a revision letter - we use the figure and state the mismatch in the same breath. The entire basis for these numbers is that you can check them, so a reader who looks one up and finds a different string should already know why.

Things we do not do, ever

• Claim or imply we tested a unit. Not in copy, not in a caption, not by a photograph laid out to look like our own test setup.
• Publish a score or a star rating of our own. There is no score field in this site's data model, which is why there is none on any page and none in the structured data.
• Mark up a rating of our own in structured data. Presenting an editorial opinion to search engines as a tested product rating would contradict our own copy and is a structured-data violation. Our markup is Product, Offer, ItemList, Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList, and nothing else.
• Show a stale price. Prices older than 48 hours disappear and the button reads Check price. Never a remembered figure, never a blank, never "from $XX".
• Fabricate a testimonial, a user quote or a case study. This site has no customers and nothing to review.
• Claim a credential we do not hold. No certifications, no expert panel, no medically reviewed by.
• Rank by commission. If a lower-paying product is better for the buyer, it goes first.
• Link a program we have not joined, or write a comparison whose buy button cannot exist.

How often this is re-checked

• Prices - daily, automated
• Whether a pick is still live, in stock and still the right call - monthly, and on any stock-out
• Model specifications against manufacturer sources - quarterly
• Wattage and running-cost tables against the ENERGY STAR list - quarterly
• EIA state electricity rates - quarterly, and on each EIA release
• DOE, ENERGY STAR and AHAM standards - annually, and immediately on any change
• Full internal and outbound link audit - quarterly

A page's dateModified is bumped only when its content actually changed, and the XML sitemap reads those real dates rather than the build timestamp. The daily price refresh redeploys the whole site, and a build-stamped sitemap would claim every page changed every day until Google stopped believing any of it.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Corrections are made at the top of the affected page with a dated note, not silently overwritten - which is cheap to do and is one of the few things a new publisher can offer that an anonymous one cannot.

Report an error. A link to the source that contradicts us is the fastest route to getting it changed. The full standards are in the editorial policy.

The current scale of the site

50 articles across seven sections, covering 21 current units. Every product on the site has a verified retailer listing, every ranking names something to skip, and every number names its source.