Best DeLonghi Dehumidifiers

It's quite a beast – Summary: What I love - Very powerful dehumidifier that removes a lot of humidity fast. - Big 6 litre built in tank (it needs it since it remove a… Read more

lot of water). - Best feature is the ability to have the unit pump removed water out a long small hose (provided). Place that hose in a drain or out a cracked window and you never have to worry about emptying the container again. - Washable and re-usable air filter. - One of the least expensive units around when looking at cents per litre of water removed (according to Choice Magazine). - Simple easy to understand buttons and LCD panel.

Things that could be better - Only two fan speeds. - Quite a loud unit (but that comes with the very powerful compressor). - No ability to direct air flow. - The brilliant pump hose I love so much comes out the front of the unit. It's ugly and gets in the way. - Heavy (but has built in wheels that work well on hard floor and thin carpet).

The long version: During the heavy watering Sydney received in March 2022, I managed to get my hands on what I think was one of the last dehumidifiers available in Sydney. I had done quite a lot of research online, including this very site, plus Choice online and a few of the other usual suspects and settled on the DeLonghi AriaDry DD230P.

The moment I got it home, I unpacked and immediately put it to work. Our house so needed it, I am sure a lot of people can relate. About five hours later my wife came home and I proudly showed her my new toy - and low and behold, the 6 litre tank was close to full. That is a massive amount of water - out of one room.

Delonghi claims that it can remove 30 Litres per day (that is of course under optimal conditions with the right humidity and temperature), but if you calculate the 6 approximate litres in 5 approximate hours, that actually does get close to 30 litres a day.

The technology lover I am I also installed a watt meter to see how much power this gadget uses. It uses, as the plaque in fact says, about 500 W when running, so depending on your electricity plan (let's say you pay 21 c per kWh as a reasonable estimate of the average), it will cost you those 21 c every two hours. That does not sound like a lot, but be careful, it adds up to $75 per month when used continuously.

Choice Magazine btw gives a cost per litre of water removed (21c per litre). I am not sure how they came up with that number, I come up with 12 to 15 c per litre removed, but for all intents and purposes, that is a useless number anyway (except for when you compare various dehumidifiers to each other, exactly what Choice Magazine is in fact doing). In the Choice test, this dehumidifier was one of the least expensive to run, even with the higher rate that Choice used for their calculations. That was one of the biggest plus points for me that drew me towards this unit.

All this incredible water removal comes at a price of course. In the shop for starters (I paid $649), when running it (see above) and also in, let's call it usability. It is a heavy piece of equipment (19 kg!), that thankfully comes with built-in wheels. It can easily be moved between rooms on hard floor and short hair carpet. For anything else, the wheels are a bit too small.

Another price you pay for the big compressor in the unit is the noise. 54 dB does not mean anything unless you are an acoustics engineer but what matters is this: Unless you are exceptionally noise tolerant, you will have a hard time sleeping when this thing is on in your bedroom, even on the lower setting. I even find it annoyingly loud to have it running in my home office during the day. The solution is, run it when you are not in the room. Over night in the office, during the day in the bedrooms or living areas.

The unit has two fan settings. I would like to have a few more. No big deal though.

Also nice to have is the easy to understand control panel with an LCD display and refreshingly few buttons with hardly any silly unnecessary settings. There is a timer that turns it on and off when you are not there and thank you Delonghi for resisting the urge to make an app for it.

One thing I am missing is the ability to direct the airflow coming out of the device. Air shoots straight up (at considerable speed), I would love to be able to direct it into the direction of an adjacent room or a drying rack or whatever. Just a few movable fins would do the trick.

I kept the best for last, though. It comes with a small built in pump and a long (about 5 m long) thin hose. With the press of one single designated button you can set the unit to discharge the water not into the built in water tank, but to pump it out of that little hose. The pump is important as it pushes the water out the hose, even if the outlet is higher than the dehumidifier is. Some other units allow you to attach a hose, but they are gravity based, so your hose has to point down-hill if you want it to work. Not in this unit, the hose is long and it can be emptying the water way higher than the unit. Out a Windows for example.

Do not underestimate how useful that feature is. No more having to carry the full water container through the house, making sure the water does not overflow and get on the carpet while you carry it. No more of the unit turning itself off automatically because you forgot to empty the reservoir at night or before you left the house. Having this ability to pump water out a separate hose is a brilliant feature, I love it.

Why in the world the connector of that little discharge hose is in the front of the unit is a mystery to me, though. It is not only ugly to have that hose run out in the front, but it is also in harm's way. Vacuum cleaning nearby? Watch for the hose, watch to not hit the plastic nozzle, it could break. Watch out when you move the unit, that nozzle sticks out just enough to hit furniture or door frames.

It also sticks out too much when you try to put the unit back into the box it came in to transport to a different house. If you are not careful and leave the nozzle attached while packing it, it will most likely break off. That is exactly what happened to me by the way. It is not exactly solely Delonghi's fault, I agree, but please, in the next version, put that outlet into the back of the unit and make it flush with the outside.

And in case you are wondering how to remove that nozzle once it has clicked into place, it's a bit tricky. It is a bayonette like mechanism that you need to push in with one hand while pulling out the hose with the other. It took me ages to figure that out (and yes, I did read the manual).

In summary its a great dehumidifier that may even be a bit of an overkill for most homes. It can handle the removal of a lot of humidity in a short period of time and the feature that allows the pumping of water out a window or a drain with a nice and long hose it brilliant. That feature makes it ideal to dry out basements or remote rooms without having to constantly manually empty the built in container.

It is heavy, it is loud and it has a very powerful compressor that is expensive to run (but since it removes so much humidity quickly, you will most likely not run it for very long periods).

It's a beast of a dehumidifier - which is great. Just know you are getting a beast.

Don’t do it. Lives on the error rating of E1 - which apparently means it could be too damp to dehumidify. I’ve owned two. Have just given up. Took one back to be serviced. Worked a couple more times and returned to error E1. What a waste of money Show details