On 6/22/2012 3:40 AM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
wrote in message
...
Use your refrigerator to dry the air in your house.
Pull the condensate out of the drip pan with a small
positive-displacement pump. Use the resulting distilled
water for plants or to fill your car battery or any
non-critical application like that.

--Winston--Pays for itself 1000x faster than PV cells!

I bought the small thermoelectric dehumidifier from Home Depot to dry
the bathroom after a shower and protect the machine tools in the
basement from rusting, when the outside air is as humid as it is now;
96% and 70F at 6AM with midday highs around 100F.
http://tinyurl.com/cbd3qtw

It costs 0.5 KWH a day to run according to the KAWez. For me that's
$0.07. Today will be its first serious capacity test. So far it's
collected about 50mL of water in half an hour.

jsw


I looked into building one of these. I'd be interested in seeing your math.
I used your numbers and the ones from the link and rounded them to
fewer digits.
I get all balled up in grains and pounds and slugs, so my math might
not be right. Maybe someone with facility could chime in.

I didn't know your shower + basement volume, so I assumed 1000 square
feet x 8 = 8000 cu ft.
IF you have 8000 cubic feet at 70F and ~100% humidity, there's 1.3 gallons
of water in the air. At the rated capacity of 1/2 pt/day,
the device could keep up with a moist air infiltration rate of 0.3CFM.

These things are always spec'd at optimum. You have to precisely control
the air flow. You want the cold side to be very near the dewpoint.
Any lower is very wasteful.
And this is at 100%. At lower humidity, the dewpoint goes down relative
to air temp. At some point, you can't keep the hot side cool enough
to get the cold side to the dewpoint. Above 30F differential, things
go to hell really fast.

The good news is that yours seems to be putting out about 10X the
specified 1/2 pt/day.
How does that compare with your numbers?