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. Our methodology is built on 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. Five 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. The results are on our page about dehumidifier recalls.

Amazon Reviews 2023

A public research dataset: 571 million reviews, collected by a lab at UC San Diego. Filtering it down took two passes. Everything with the word “dehumidifier” in the product title came to 213,539 reviews, and more than half of that turned out to be calcium chloride tubs, portable air conditioners with a dry mode, replacement filters, and rod heaters for gun safes. After sorting by product type, 62,317 reviews of 711 household units remained. Inside those, 2,964 reviewers described a humid climate and 998 named Florida outright.

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. The full breakdown is on our page about what these reviews show about Florida.

FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program

Every flood insurance claim on record, published by FEMA with personal details removed. The Florida slice runs to 448,536 claims and 19.31 billion dollars paid between 1978 and 2026, which we use for our water damage pages.

Raw totals by ZIP code measure how many houses stand there, not how badly an area floods, so our methodology divides by the housing stock from the Census Bureau. The ranking changes completely once you do. Two limits stated plainly: NFIP covers flooding, meaning outside water rising onto normally dry land, so roof leaks, burst pipes, and condensation are not in these numbers at all. And not every home carries a policy. These figures are a floor, not the full picture.

ENERGY STAR certified products

The federal register of dehumidifiers certified by the EPA and the Department of Energy: 535 models, with tested capacity, energy factor, annual kilowatt hours, and refrigerant for each one. Two things become visible here that no product listing will tell you.

First, capacity on the box and capacity in the register are different measurements. Among 511 certified portable units, not one is rated above 50.0 pints per day under the current federal test procedure. Second, 128 brand names in that register belong to 75 certifying companies, and several familiar Amazon brands share one filing.

Certification confirms energy efficiency and nothing else. It is not a quality rating, and taking part is voluntary, so a model missing from the register is not automatically worse.

The Florida housing standard

Data answers “how much.” It doesn’t answer whether a piece of advice fits a Florida house. Most home advice online is written for northern homes: basements, boilers, storm windows. A Florida house is built differently, and a tip that works in Ohio can make things worse here.

So every article on this site is checked against an internal reference base on Florida housing before it goes out: how homes here are actually built, decade by decade, from slab foundations to attic ductwork. We compiled it from the Florida Building Code, research by the Florida Solar Energy Center and the University of Florida, FEMA, and the working knowledge of Florida contractors and home inspectors. 28 sources in total. Advice that fails this check does not get published.

The federal claims data backs this up. Of Florida flood claims filed since 2015 with a foundation type recorded, 73.3% were slab houses and 0.6% were basements. When an article tells you to go check the basement, it wasn’t written for this state.

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, FEMA, ENERGY STAR, and Census data is free to anyone. The Amazon dataset is available to researchers. Our own numbers appear on the research pages, including thirty years of Florida humidity and the ZIP codes where water damage concentrates. If our methodology 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.