2 min readAfter moving out of my white-box Brooklyn apartment into a townhouse unit built in the 1890s, I faced renter conundrums I hadn’t encountered before. Sloped floors, uneven walls, visits from ants (and other creepy crawlies), but one of the biggest annoyances was the fluctuations in humidity.
In the winter, my house gets so dry that my wooden dining table actually cracks, and in the summer, especially when it rains, the air feels clammy, and my rugs feel damp. Six months into living here, my husband and I immediately went into triage mode and bought a dehumidifier on Amazon after some research.
We wanted a small-space-friendly, under-$200 pick that had good reviews, and the brand hOmeLabs kept popping up. We bought a dehumidifier that covered 1,000 square feet, and this compact device worked like magic. Within hours, our humidity went from being in the 70 percent range to a more comfortable 55 to 60 percent range, depending on the day and weather. Our dehumidifier removes up to 1.2 gallons of moisture daily, and I’m always shocked by how much water the tray collects in a day (when the summer is super humid, I need to empty the tray twice a day!).
The dehumidifier needs to be plugged into an outlet.
The tray collects water daily, which I easily dump out in the sink.
Other features include automatic shutoff once the indoor humidity reaches an optimal level, a timer (that we never used to be honest), and different modes (dry, turbo, and comfort). We typically keep it on dry and sometimes use turbo when the air feels very sticky. The hOmeLabs device is also truly so compact and quiet that we can tuck it into a corner of our dining space, so it doesn’t bother anyone. The dehumidifier also has a top handle, so you can easily lug it from room to room if needed, and it has wheels.
Since our dehumidifier is on the smaller side, we noticed it doesn’t reach upstairs, and sometimes the humidity on our bottom floor is just too high for our little guy to tackle completely. Our upstairs rooms still felt gross this year, so this week, during Prime Day, we bought a second hOmeLabs that covers 1,800 square feet.
We paid full price for our first hOmeLabs dehumidifier, so we were happy to find the newer model on sale for 15 percent off. I know this doesn’t sound as impressive as 50 or 80 percent off, but scoring another one for under $150 is a big win for us!
Plus, the second one we bought is actually a newer model of our old unit, so it has all the same features we love and an additional feature: the ability to connect to Wi-Fi so you can control it remotely. It also covers more space, so we’re planning to move our old dehumidifier upstairs and keep the new one downstairs. If you’ve been battling humidity in your own home, you need this compact and mighty hOmeLabs. You won’t regret getting it.
