Piggie

Hot in North Central Florida (I don't live in the panhandle but 80 miles north of Orlando).

Since the middle of June it's been like August days. 95 by 2:30 has been the norm. Normally we don't see much above 90 until this time of year but it started 6 weeks ago.

My vegie crops had a very hard time in June and early July when it's not normally 95 degrees. It really hurt a lot of my plants that probably thought it was August and time to stop producing.

Rain comes and goes, but that is normal for FL. We go 2 weeks without enough rain to count then days of constant rain. I can't say that isn't really normal for here. But a lot of summers we get the daily afternoon thunderstorm, but not this year. Feast or famine as far as rain.

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I found a solution to dehumidifying my house. If the outside temp drops below 82 or so the central AC unit doesn't run much. This only happens during the days in a row when it rains all day. The humidity would go way up unless I ran the AC way too cold (read that dollars).

I have a tiny 5000 BTU unit in my bedroom. We normally just use it at night and turn the main unit up a couple degrees at night. That keeps the big unit from coming on much if at all as it doesn't pay either to let the house heat up too much. Plus with the tiny unit I can sleep at 70 degrees which is nice as I run the main unit at 81 degrees.

So I thought one the second day a week of constant rain, why not run the little unit all day? It worked. It's so small it' makes almost no difference cooling the house but it sucks a ton of water out of the air, because it runs nearly constant with the bedroom door open and turned up on max cool.

I have played with it and if the temp outside gets over 85, the main unit runs enough it's a waste of electricity to run the little unit in the day. But below that on damp days (all we ever have in the summer) it pullls out the humidity. Then it double for a comfortable low cost AC for sleeping at night.

since I started cutting off the big AC at night I have seen a drop in the electic bill from last year that wasn't even as hot as this summer. It's only about 4 KWH a day, but that helps.

Did the math. The bedroom AC runs about 50% duty cycle with the door closed. It pulls 0.55KWH per hour of operation. So it runs about 5 hours a night (to add an hour to cool down). That is 2.75 KWH per night.

The big unit pulls 3.6 KWH per hour of operation. The main unit before ran about 2 hours a night total. For about 7.2 KWH for the night. So you can see there the approx 4 KWH per day I am saving.

That works out to be about double what I saved switching all the lights here to fluorescent and lower energy bulbs.

So for an $89 device (less than most dehumidifiers) it is a dual purpose unit.