Updated November 2018

Best Frigidaire Dehumidifiers



Best Frigidaire Dehumidifiers Updated November 2018





Check Price at: 1 store
Rapidly lowers the humidity in your house or basement. Will handle houses 2000-2500 square feet in size.
Very quiet. Water tank is easy to empty and replace. Auto-detects presence of water tank and resumes operation.
Water tank is too small. Purchase a hose to drain it continuously.


Dehumidifier with Built-in Pump in White 70 Pint
Check Price at: 1 store
A very popular model in the Frigidaire line.
Works especially well when set up for continuous drain. Ultra quiet.
Fairly short life-span on this product, about 12-18 months.


Energy Star 50-pint Dehumidifier
Check Price at: 1 store
The number one most popular model in the Frigidaire line.
Will dehumidify homes that are 1400 square feet or less. Great bang for the buck!
Can't be used with an extension cord, which limits where it can be placed.


70-Pint Dehumidifier
Check Price at: 1 store
This is the “Big Brother” model of the 50-pint dehumidifier.
This will dehumidify a house up to 2000 square feet in size. Also a workhorse for drying a house after a flood.
Again, can't be used with an extension cord.


Customer Reviews

Best Frigidaire Dehumidifier Reviews Guide

Dehumidifiers are machines designed to “wring” the water out of the air in your house. Picture the air in your house as a giant sponge full of water. Dehumidifiers act to squeeze the water out of the sponge. This is vastly over-simplified of course, and we’ll cover the nuts-and-bolts of how they actually work further on, but this will give you an idea of what they are and what they do.

How Dehumidifiers Work

Most dehumidifiers are air conditioners that have been slightly modified to draw the moisture out of the air in your house. There are several steps in the process, and understanding them will help you make your decision about which one to get.

  1. A fan sucks warm, moist air from your house into the machine, typically through a grill of some kind.
  2. The warm, moist air is cooled by being passed over a series of freezing cold pipes containing freon. A separate pump and compressor continuously circulate the freon through the pipes to keep them cold.
  3. As the pipes cool the air, moisture in the air condenses onto the pipes and drips down into the water collection tank. You can see this happening around the A/C unit outside where condensed water drips out of a pipe and forms a soggy area around the air conditioner.
  4. The dry, dehumidified air is then heated back up to the original room temperature by an electric heater in the unit. This is where a lot of the electricity is being used.
  5. The rewarmed air is blown back into the room through a grill opposite the one it was drawn into. This means you need to keep both sides of it free of any obstructions.
  6. A plastic float in the collection tank gradually rises with the water level (just like the one in your toilet) until it trips a switch that shuts off intake fan and turns on an indicator light to let you know it’s time to empty the tank.
  7. Remove the tank and empty it into the sink. Replace the tank and the unit should sense it is empty and automatically resume normal operations.

Unexplained stains on the ceiling and walls are the result of high humidity. Moisture is seeping into the paint.”

Reasons to get a dehumidifier

High humidity in your houses (anything over 60-65%) will eventually cause warping in any wood items in your house, from hardwood floors to furniture to cabinets to picture frames around family photos on the wall. Anything made of wood will gradually absorb moisture out of the surrounding air, which in turn can warp and twist the wood along the weakest lines in the grain. Hardwood floor may take longer than other woods, but they can, and will, eventually warp if the humidity in your house stays too high for too long.

Harmful bacteria too small to be visible thrive in conditions of high humidity. Dust mites, which cause all kinds of allergies, don’t drink water but absorb it directly out of the air. They love humidity levels of 70% and over. But, if those levels drop below 50%, there won’t be enough humidity in the air for them to survive. All the sudden those non-stop runny noses, watery eyes, sneezing, and coughing you or someone else has experienced while in your house will come to a screeching halt. Mold, also bacteria related, is another result of high humidity too.

Persistent flu-like symptoms that become more pronounced when you're in the house, then decrease when you're away from the house, may indicate allergic problems caused by high humidity.”

3 Major Factors to Consider

When you’re in the market for a dehumidifier there are a number of factors you need to take into consideration before you rush out and put your money down. Let’s take a look at them now.

Dehumidifier Size

Dehumidifiers are sized according to how many pints of water they can remove from the air in a set amount of time, specifically, how many pints it can remove in a 24-hour period at 60% humidity and 80ºF(27ºC). This is the benchmark that determines the size of a dehumidifier. When you see one listed that says it is a 70-pint dehumidifier, you can expect it to remove 70 pints of water from the air in one day.

Dehumidifiers come in a wide variety of sizes. Picking the right one for your house is important. You don’t want to overbuy and get a machine that will dehumidify an entire warehouse, but you don’t want to under buy either. 

As a general rule of thumb, you can use the following chart to pick which dehumidifier you should get.

Square Feet
Pint Unit
1000-1400 45-55
1400-2000 70
>2000 95+

The humidity in your house, as well as the temperature, will cause you to adjust these numbers accordingly. In the Deep South, where the humidity is 70% and above during most of the year and the temperatures soar during the summer, you might need to get a 70-pint unit even if your house or apartment is less than 1400 square feet.

But in the Great Plains, a 2500 square foot house might get away with a 45-pint unit if the relative humidity and temperature are lower than normal. In order to determine the humidity in your house, you can use something called a humidistat. They normally run about $10-$15 depending on the model. Before spending several hundred bucks on a dehumidifier, spend a lot less so you can figure out what size humidifier you need.

Electrical Costs

Dehumidifiers typically run on electricity and need to run for long periods of time. In some cases, they need to run continuously for weeks or even months. So how much is all that going to cost you on an ongoing basis? It depends on several factors.

  1. How much electricity the model you purchase uses. The dehumidifiers we’ve reviewed range from a low of 530 kilowatt hours (kWh) to a high of over 800 kWh. This means a unit will use 530 kilowatts per hour at the low end, to more than 800 kilowatts per hour at the high end.
  2. Electric companies charge for power by the kWh. One local electric company SWEPCO charges 7.6379¢ per kWh from May to October. From November to April they charge 5.6639¢ kWh for the first 600 Kilowatts and 4.6839¢ per kWh after that.

Assuming that most people will use their dehumidifiers primarily during the summer months, we’ll use the May to October rate to calculate the cost per minute, then multiply that by 24 hours to get the cost per day. Finally, we’ll multiply by 30 to get the average cost per month. The result looks like the calculations below:

  • 530 kWh x 7.6379¢ = 4.04¢ per hour x 24 hours = $0.96/day x 30 days = $28.80/month
  • 745 kWh x 7.6379¢ = 5.69¢ per hour x 24 hours = $1.36/day x 30 days = $40.80/month
  • 800 kWh x 7.6379¢ = 6.11¢ per hour x 24 hours = $1.47/day x 30 days = $44.10/month

Remember, this is on top of whatever your existing electric bill already is. The “cash register price” for your dehumidifier is only part of the cost. The true cost is that price plus the monthly electric bill. This is something to keep in mind when choosing which dehumidifier is right for you.

Tank and Drain Hose

A key factor with dehumidifiers is the water that is collected. If you ever find a dehumidifier that has a collection tank as large as its pints per day size – marry it. There’ll never be another one like it. In the meantime, you’ll have to empty the water collection tank several times a day because they are always several sizes smaller than the capacity of the unit as a whole.

However, most of them have a place to attach a hose. In some cases, the manufacturer sells a hose specifically for that model. Usually, though you can attach a simple garden hose to it and the built-in pump will push the water through the hose to whatever drain you put the other end in.

Now you have a garden hose snaking through the house to the bathtub or basement drain.

If you’re minded to be a DIY enthusiast you could cut a hole in the wall to pass the hose through to the outside. With the right tools, you could do a professional job of it and make it look like it there when you bought the house. Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out what to do with the hose.

If you have a separate laundry room with a deep sink, you could put the dehumidifier in there and run a short hose into the sink. It would be more or less out of sight that way and you wouldn’t have to attempt any carpentry.

Whether you decide it’s easier to empty the collection tank every few hours or run a hose to a drain, you’re better off making that decision before you buy.

Experts recommend that the humidity inside your house should be kept between 30% – 50% in the summer, and 30% – 40% in the winter.”

Tips For Use

  • If you’re not using a hose, empty the collection tank right before you go to bed. This will allow the unit to run most of the night before the collection tank fills up and deactivates the fan. When you get up in the morning the air in the house will still be relatively dry. All you have to do is empty the collection tank and start it back up again.
  • Moisture and condensation come with the territory when you have a dehumidifier. This means the inside of them is a natural place for mold to grow. Cleaning regularly will kill any developing mold while preventing any new spores from taking hold. The less mold inside the machine, the longer it will last.

Low humidity makes you feel cooler than the actual temperature because sweat rapidly evaporates, cooling us off in the process.”

The team that worked on this review

Kealia Reynolds
Photo Editor
Rebekah Sedaca
Kelsey Roadruck
Sr. Editor
John Morgan
