Methodology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For licensing-market research, we use public extracts from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. We preserve retrieval dates, separate licenses from people, and filter primary and secondary status codes before counting. Our guide to Florida DBPR license data downloads documents the file layouts, update schedules, and common counting errors.