AprilAire E080 Whole House Dehumidifier for Basement & Crawl Space – 80-Pint High-Capacity Commercial Dehumidifier for Homes Up to 4,400 Sq. Ft. with Pump, Drain Hose, & Hanging Kit for DIY Install

I ordered and installed one on these units in my house to complement my Aprilaire 700M humidifier. In the Chicago suburbs we get bone dry winters and hot humid summers. The undersized AC unit game only goes so far here and does not work for the cool humid late spring and early fall since it is too cool for an AC call. The only option is to run the AC until your house is frozen. Between AC calls in the summer, the humidity creeps back in while the temperature holds and the AC sits in the background waiting for the temperature to increase to turn on. Then you have to lower your thermostat just to dehumidify your house. I have had this unit for 2 days and already I notice a difference. The first floor is nearly as dry as the basement (which I have been using an oversized stand alone unit since I moved in) while the upstairs is comfortable, which is up from unbearable. Running a dehumidifier in the basement does help a lot, but it has been a losing battle on the first and especially the second floor.I selected the E080 because it was the most quiet and power efficient unit while having different ducting options as well as a filter access door on both sides. The E070 was more than enough for my 1364 sq ft townhome, but I have extremely limited space to work with in the basement and the filter access on both sides came handy. I had to duct this unit to the Aprilaire recommended return to return vs the more appropriate return to supply because the pressure differences while the HVAC fan is running causes air not to flow through the unit. I am using a Google Nest to control the unit via a relay. I am using a cam rotary switch to select between the humidifier and dehumidifier relays and reprogramming the thermostat for the device selected since the Nest supports only one device at a time. I am running this unit as a stand alone with the HVAC fan active in the Nest setup. I originally ran it return to supply with the HVAC fan not active but AC calls kicked on the fan regardless causing air not to flow through the dehumidifier, which was why I was forced to change it to return to return. It was a pretty difficult and tricky install that required a lot of planning ahead of time, along with a ducting change, but it was all well worth it in the end. The unit is extremely quite. The AC is running less and the house is very comfortable with the thermostat set higher. The temperature difference between the first and second floor is now half. I have never lived in a house this comfortable during this time of the year. I am looking forward to seeing how this unit performs when the summer gets hot and muggy. This is seriously like adding a dehumidifier in every room. Depending how this unit works out in the long run, I might just look to replacing my 50 pint standing unit with the E070 for my basement (there is no ducting in the basement so a separate unit is needed).

Got this when my old commercial grade dehumidifier, that was sold by the basement company, finally died.This Aprilaire is smaller, it’s mightier, it’s less expensive. I am attracted to the information that it is American made and it is repairable by the consumer with support from Aprilaire.My old one had to be serviced by the company who could not come to my house for over a month during the most humid New England summer on record to even just pronounce it dead.This dehumidifier went right to work and got the humidity levels down quickly. I don’t find it to be loud. It is quieter than my old one. It is set up better for my situation and I am hopeful it lasts a very long time.My only complaint is that i also ordered the remote display which did not come with wiring to set it up, so that’s a project for later.Right now my house has dried out and feels and smells so much better!

Using this to handle humidity in a 3300 sq./ft. home. 50% of the house was built in 1918 and the other in 2006. We recently installed hardwood flooring on the entire first floor. This unit was needed to maintain a very specific relative humidity so the floor doesn’t swell and contract with moisture variations that were not manageable with the furnace and AC alone. This unit sit in our basement and drains directly to a floor drain. This can be installing directly into the duct work but I did not use that option.Within 24 hours of installing, the relative humidity was pulled down to our target 52-55%.Runs quiet and efficiently. My new floor will be trouble free from now on.

I recently improved the insulation and sealing of my northern NC home. I contacted with an insulation specialist who removed the insulation between the ceiling and the attic, then sprayed a thick layer of open cell foam under the roof, on the gable ends, and between the floor and the top of the sealed crawl space. They also installed an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) in the crawl space.The ACH50 blower door test result was about 2 after this work. For context, a passive house is required to get below 0.6. anything below 5, and they recommend an ERV. Below 3, you definitely need an ERV. A typical untreated American house might be in the 8-10 range. I was happy with this result. To get better, I think I'd probably have to take off all the siding and re-wrap / re seal, which would be rather expensive.The side effect of this enhanced sealing was that the humidity level in the house went way up (around 65%), so I purchased the Aprilaire unit. After initial install, the humidity dropped fairly quickly to about 50%, but with the unit running 24/7 it seemed to stall out at that number. Over the next 3 weeks, however, the humidity continued to drop to as low as 40% as well the dampness that had gathered in the house sponged out. If you're shooting for a significant drop in humidity, be patient. Don't assume that the initial stall out humidity level will be all you're going to get.As one of the other reviewers commented, the 'up to 4400sq ft' statement is probably for a relatively dry northern zone. If you're in a really humid southern USA environment, you will probably need a bigger unit if your house is over 2000 square feet of conditioned space. It's probably about the right size for my well sealed 1500 sq ft home to control between 45% and 50% in the main living space. For a 3000 sq ft place, or perhaps smaller if it is less well sealed, I think I'd want to purchase a 140 pint per day unit instead of this unit's 80 pint per day capability.My next issue was that the company that installed the dehumidifier and model 76 controller (not the same as the company that did the rest of the work), set and wired the unit in remote mode. This means that the system was controlling to the humidity level at the unit in the crawl space, not the panel in the living space. This meant that the controlled humidity reported at the panel was about 55% while the actual humidity in the main living space was down at 40%. This meant that the dehumidifier was burning a lot of unnecessary energy.After swapping a few emails with the extremely helpful tech support people at Aprilaire, I was able to rewire the stem and set the E080 in 'external' mode. Reconfiguration was an initial problem until I was told to press 'mode' a couple more times after disabling remote mode and enabling external mode to get to 'done', where the unit writes the changed configuration to non volatile memory.Now it's controlling on the humistat in the model 76 controller. The humidity reported by the model 76 matches reasonably closely the level reported by my Nest thermostat, and the dehumidifier will cycle between 46% and 50% (burning a more reasonable amount of energy that the previous configuration).