Methodology

Most product sites test a few units in an office and rank them. We don’t have an office full of dehumidifiers, and we don’t pretend to. We work with open data instead. Here is what that means and where the limits are.

What we do

We take public datasets and pull answers out of them for Florida homeowners. Four sources do most of the work.

NOAA and the National Weather Service

Climate records going back three decades. When we cite humidity or dew point for a Florida metro, we name the weather station and the period. Numbers without a source are just opinions, and we try not to publish opinions.

CPSC and SaferProducts.gov

The federal database of product recalls and consumer complaints. We keep the two layers separate. A recall is a documented fact: a specific model was recalled, this many units, here is the reason. A complaint is an unverified consumer report, and we always say so: “according to complaints filed with the CPSC.” We don’t turn a complaint into an accusation.

Amazon Reviews 2023

A public research dataset: 571 million reviews, collected by a lab at UC San Diego. We filter it for reviews left by dehumidifier owners in humid climates and publish what the numbers show: patterns, percentages, how often a specific failure comes up. Two honest notes:

• “Humid climate” means the reviewer mentioned it themselves. There is no location tag in the data, so this is self-selection, and people whose humidity became a problem write about it more often. We read the numbers with that correction in mind.
• The dataset ends in 2023. Anything newer we check by hand against current listings and mark separately, never mixing it into the historical numbers.

From this data we publish conclusions and aggregates. We do not reprint the reviews themselves.

FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program

Insurance claims by ZIP code, used for our water damage pages. One limit stated plainly: NFIP claims are not all water losses. Not every home is insured through NFIP, so these numbers show a floor, not the full picture. Data from OpenFEMA.

What we don’t do

• We don’t test 50 dehumidifiers in a week. Nobody honestly can, and we won’t claim we did.
• We don’t sell ranking spots and don’t take money for reviews.
• We don’t write about climates we haven’t lived in.

Check our work

Every source above is open. NOAA, CPSC, and FEMA data is free to anyone. The Amazon dataset is available to researchers. If we got something wrong, we want to know: write to us and we’ll fix it.

This work is done by Vitalii Markov. How the site earns money, and why that doesn’t affect our recommendations, is on the affiliate disclosure page.