Dehumidifier water. Whenever anybody who owns one of these appliances considers it at all, it’s usually as an annoyance. Waking up out of a sound sleep hearing the “I’m Full Now!” beeps is nobody’s idea of fun.
Having said that, dehumidifier water can be a very handy thing to have and use.
Dehumidifier Water: What Is It?
Well, obviously dehumidifier water is what’s left over when a dehumidifier sucks the water out of the air.
There are all different types of dehumidifiers out there. Some are built-in to a house or building’s climate control system. Others are small, portable units designed for a single room or a small grouping of rooms.
I’m going to talk about these room units exclusively, because they have water collection tanks that are easy to access, and they are often emptied (if you live in a humid environment). True, some of these small units have “hose outlets” so you can just run them into a drain and never have to worry about emptying them, but I’m going to stick to talking about collecting water in the tanks.
A well-used tank of a dehumidifier from my gun room. I’m thinking purification might be a good idea before drinking anything out of this thing.
Salty, how is any of this prepping?
As somebody who has lived on an humid Pacific island with electricity but without running water for six months, let me share how.
When I was a kid, I was a military brat. In 1971, we moved to the island of Okinawa during what was a horrible drought. When we got there, the reservoirs were nearly dry, and shortly thereafter they turned off everybody’s water.
Every neighborhood was allocated two hours of water every other week, when you could fill up all of your water containers. The water that came out of the tap, through the half-century old rusted pipes, was a burnt orange. It was useful only for flushing a toilet. You couldn’t use it in the tub, or wash clothing with it. It was only fit for flushing.
Electricity was not an issue. Since Oki is a tropical island, we also did not suffer from a lack of overall humidity. If we had a dehumidifier, we could have produced a gallon or two of clean water a day. That would be enough to at least do sanitation needs.
Small SHTF moments happen all the time
We keep coming back to this, but it’s important to realize that we need to remember that the Stuff can Hit The Fan (SHTF) on a personal, local or regional level. In fact, a local SHTF situation is far more likely to happen than a national or world-wide one.
It’s easy to imaging many scenarios where you would have electrical power but not have access to clear running water.
Having water from a dehumidifier is a great asset in a water-based SHTF shortage… but…
Is dehumidifier water safe to drink untreated?
No, it’s not.
That’s the short answer anyway… in a perfect world it would be. In a perfect world, you’d keep everything spotless and clean and have the dehumidifier running in a kitchen-like environment.
News flash: We don’t live in a perfect world.
In our world, the dehumidifier sits somewhere out of the way, in a corner or tucked away in a basement. The tank that collects the water isn’t generally scrubbed down like a food container. Also, it’s it’s open to contamination.
I’m borrowing this from Wikipedia because it sums this up nicely:
Water collected from any dehumidifier is technically distilled water in that it does contain few of the minerals and other particulates that are removed in a true distillation process. However, a true distillation process condenses the steam of boiled water, and the boiling process kills any microbes and fungi that may be present in the pre-distilled water. Dehumidifiers are also not kept to a state of cleanliness required for food-grade standards (drinking water usually has very high legal requirements). The collected water is therefore not considered safe to drink.[1] Also, as the water may sit for a while in the collection bucket, the water may be quite stale, in particular with fungus collected from aerial spores.
In our household, we have many different ways we can filter water. The advantage that water from the dehumidifier has over pond or creek water is that it’s clear, and not full of sediments. Therefore, we don’t need to pre-filter it before we treat it for human consumption. Besides, it’s right here in the house. Pond and creek water has to be hauled up hill, and that gets old fast.
Water purification
We have a very simple solution in our house, because one of our water treatment options are Berkey filters. Here’s one sitting on my car hood. (Fans of our podcast might know this as “the red studio”).
When you dump water into the upper chamber of the Berkey, it flows through at least one (this one has two) filters and become safe for human consumption.
So why do Salty & Spice have multiple dehumidifiers, anyway?
Missouri is generally very humid, and humidity is uncomfortable. We do have heating and air conditioning in our house. You would think that we would not need a dehumidifier in our main living area, right?
Well… we have guns and we have cameras.
The best humidity level to store firearms at is 50 percent, and camera lenses “like” to be stored as dry as possible. I own a huge collection of antique camera lenses, and “camera lens fungus” is a real thing. I need to eliminate high humidity situations as much as possible.
A humidity level of 75 percent may be perfectly comfortable for you. However, your guns won’t enjoy it nearly as much in the long term.
There are many other types of home goods & electronics that will also last much longer if you keep the humidity level at 50 percent. Even crackers keep better in the dehumidified house.
Do you REALLY think I will ever use this?
I guess it depends on where you live and what experiences you have. If you live in Phoenix, Arizona, then no. If you were living in places like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids Iowa a few years back when they lost their water treatment systems to flooding, then yes, you might.
How about if you lived in Flint, Michigan and didn’t want to drink poisoned water?
I am not proposing that dehumidifier water is a prime prepping resource, but it’s there and it’s something that can be used if needed.
We regularly use our dehumidifier water during the summers. It’s got to be dumped somewhere. Why not in the herb garden just outside the door? If nothing else, it’s a way to keep a few choice plants alive in a drought during strong water restrictions.
This is thinking outside the box. I like it. I also suspect that if you were in a situation where you needed to use this water, it wouldn’t be that hard to clean up the equipment to a degree that you could drink it directly.
I’ve looked at ours, Uncle George. The organics contamination from manufacture could be handled easily; one wash in warm soapy water would do pretty well. The ability of fungal spores to get in can not. Fortunately, pretty much Any water purification method, including the cheapest and easiest filters, take care of that.
By the way, I consider that fungal risk pretty small. If I had no filter, I wouldn’t worry about it. Since I think preppers should have plenty of filters for bigger threats and I do, it’s a one minute job to use them on dehumidfier water, so why not?
As a solar panel fan I looked up dehumidifiers. Most draw too much power for the amount of water generated BUT the newer style Peltier Dehumidifiers are very efficient. A mid sized 3 gallons daily rated draws 3 amps at 115 volts well with in a small 200 watt solar panel kit. As useful for medical needs distilled water is and the cooling effect of reducing humidity in summer I may have to add one to my house.
Thanks for the idea!
We live in SE Utah were we have relatively low humidity. We use swamp coolers for cooling. During the summer, the swamp cooler has a tube that draws water out so we reduce calcium buildup. The tube use to run into a drain. I finally realized that since I paid for the water as it went into my cooler why not reuse it. The tube now runs into a rain barrel that feeds into my garden. Essentially I am using the same water twice, once for cooling and second for garden.
Good idea….time for me to research swamp coolers some more.
An old-timer I knew years ago, in South Wisconsin, needed distilled water for his “home-made wine” (made and kept in his basement). He chose to save $ by using a large basement-cellar dehumidifier in a room with stacked and non-cemented limestone walls…his home was on top of a hill that absorbed plenty of water and snow melt, but his basement rarely got flooded, so it was sufficiently humid all year long, even in winter (since the bottom of the basement was below frost levels).
I used a 1-gallon dehumidifier mostly in Summer and Fall, to keep down mold and mildew in a solid poured cement basement. The basement air stayed “quite dry” (and cold) for several days, with the result that when it was quite humid, it could produce about 1.5 – 2 gallons of water a day. But as the days went on and the air dried out, it regularly provided 0.5 gallons of water daily.
If one intends to use a dehumidifier for back up drinking water supply–portable is the way to go (you can take it outside if your basement or home gets too dry, and bigger is better as it provides more “air sourced water”.
There was a time in my youth (1950s-1960s) when power companies also limited electrical output to several hours daily for a shortage of fuel, or infrastructure repairs and upgrades that required shutting down power output. Should that happen, a larger unit (or multiple small units) might fill a gallon or more during a several hour period of power availability time.
Michael, I cannot find the Peltier Dehumidifier anywhere on the internet.
Can you please direct me.
What model and brand of solar panels do you recommend to drive it?
I live in a high rise condo in Southern California with excellent sunlight. I plan on using the panels to run the dehumidifier if there is an emergency like an earthquake to generate just enough water to survive on.
Thank you, Sigmund