Our house has a humidity issue. It's too humid, which is pretty odd for houses around here at this time of year. We had one of those single room dehumidifiers running in our basement on its maximum setting, but it never seemed to get the humidity past 55%. Ideal is somewhere closer to 40%.

We did some research and found this Aprilaire whole house dehumidifier. Stand alone it's nothing more then a really big single room dehumidifier. Hook it into your HVAC duct work and it's a whole house dehumidifier. It even has wiring and controls to interact with your HVAC (ie. if the AC kicks on the dehumidifier kicks off). Since we heat with our pellet stove, the whole house setup wasn't practical and for the size of our house didn't seem necessary.

From the Aprilaire website, I found a dealer and had them come out for an estimate. He took lots of measurements, examined the setup and our house layout, then proceeded to sell us a bunch of crap I didn't want. On top of that his price seemed ridiculous. I'd done enough research online to know what these things and the parts required cost. Added up and subtracted from his cost, labor was going to run us around $800 for a 5 hour job. I wasn't buying that.

So I found another dealer. He had a great offer. The holidays are the slowest time of year for him. If we let them in to do it the week of Christmas, he'd do it cheaper. We did discuss a lot of options with them and they were very helpful. It turns out the "open" setup is really the best setup for our situation. At the very least, it gives us options for other configurations if we need them in the future. We also decided to move the unit to our workroom where the majority of our humidity comes from. They were even accommodating enough to cut out some shelving so we could tuck it against the wall.

The hole in the wall goes to the furnace room. The dehumidifier blows the dry warm air through the hole for the furnace to pick up and blow through the house if we so desire. The pump (this is the hokey part) pumps the removed water to the pump at the furnace which pumps it to the septic line. Why we couldn't just pump this to the septic line, I'm not sure.