What sits in your basement buzzing away all by its lonesome, night and day, chewing up hundreds of kilowatt hours of energy each month?

Trying to figure out why your energy bill is so high?

Look no further than this post…answer…drumroll please.

How about your dehumidifier (if you have one)!  Another culprit in my ongoing Kill-a-Watt energy pig scavenger hunt (along with my phantom cable TV box).

Piggy, the Dehumidifier by Whirlpool

Now admittedly, mine is rather old.  I’d give you the model number – but there isn’t one on the unit (no really, there isn’t).  Even the owners manual doesn’t have one.  So this unit is probably circa the late 90’s.  All I can really tell you is that Whirlpool made it. 

But I can tell you how much juice this puppy uses when it’s doing its job on the “low” setting.

750 watts

That’s .75 kilowatts.  I won’t bother to discuss the high setting.  Hopefully I’ve got your attention.  Fortunately, after a few days on low the 1.5 gallon (or so) bucket fills up and the unit shuts off; so we can ratchet back the coal bonfire needed to keep this pig rooting in its trough.  Of course you can set it to perpetually “dehumidify” by attaching a hose to it.  You could also burn a pile of one dollar bills in your basement each night to dry things up a little. 

Not that we actually wanted to send any of our kids to college anyways.

So here’s the cost of owning this pig and feeding it day and night:

8760 hours (per year) x .75 kilowatts = 6,570 kilowatt hours.  Which, for our neck of the woods (Brookline, MA, NSTAR) at a rate of $.163 per kWh (July, 2010) works out to exactly $1,427.88 per year.

Now, to be fair, it doesn’t run 7×24x365, at least mine doesn’t.  There’s “wet season” and “dry season,” which pretty much sorts out to above freezing, or wet(March through November) and below freezing (the months when I don’t care because I’m off skiing and skating).  So figure 2/3’s wet, 1/3 dry.

Phew, we’re down to $942 per year.

Now in fairness again, it probably runs, or has been running, 50% of the time or so during our swampy New England spring summer and fall.  Still, I can think of a lot better things to do with $470 and I’m sure you can too.

Time to bring this little piggy to slaughter.  But the damp basement still remains.  What’s an energy farm owner to do? 

A quick trundle through cyber space tells me that calcium chloride (CaCl) is a non-electric alternative.  Damp rid type commercial formulations feature this compound prominently.   Key challenges include corrosion and a process for drying the moist crystals back out so they can be reused.  Worth it, in my book.  So off I go to find my valuable crystals. 

There’s also the old fashioned practice of increasing fresh air circulation to the basement.  Turns out, pigs like moist, damp spaces for rooting.  So a nice 20 watt fan and an open cellar door a few hours a week on dry days sure helps.  And it’s a lot cheaper.

My pigs cute and I’ve owned it longer than any of my cars.  But it’s gotta go!

My advice to you?  Ditch that dehumidifier.  Put it on the curb, cut the cord and figure out a better way.

Of course we could all heat the planet up to the point where we don’t need dehumidifiers any more. 

Nah, cut the cord!