LESLIE: Manny in New York’s got a moisture situation. What’s going on?
MANNY: I have a basement about 1,500 square foot.
TOM: OK.
MANNY: Been having moisture in the basement over the past six seasons. In the summertime it is so much and I have a lot of mold and I use a dehumidifier that was given to me by the builder.
TOM: OK.
MANNY: If I run the dehumidifier and I’m not there the water will spill on the floor.
TOM: I have a better solution for you, Manny. A couple of things. First of all, the grading and the drainage around the outside of your house is going to have a direct impact on how much moisture you get in the basement. So, for example, if your gutters are clogged or if the soil around your house is fairly flat, you’re going to have a lot of water that sits around the foundation and that’s going to be saturated into the foundation and then evaporate into the basement so humidity gets to be pretty high.
The solution to the dehumidifier that you’re running right now that has to be drained all the time is something called a whole-home dehumidifier. A whole-home dehumidifier is installed into your HVAC system and it runs automatically 24/7 to take moisture out of that space. So it’s not a portable; it’s a permanently-installed dehumidifier. And an in-between solution, if you don’t want to go for that, is to pick up a condensate pump for the portable. A condensate pump could be mounted to drain out of the portable. It’ll lift the water out and then stick it outside. Now I in my house, for example, have a hot water heating system and I have a dehumidifier in our basement and I put a condensate pump on that because I didn’t have a ducted system to use with a whole-home, so I put a condensate pump on my portable dehumidifier and it works perfectly.
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