OT Which direction is your ceiling fan SUPPOSED to run?

Because you miswired it, you can't do anything right.

How do you know water doesn't come out of it? Is this a window unit? They normally drip the water on the outside. If it is a fixed unit they either run a tube outside or to a drain inside.

Running the fan likely has very little (if any) effect on room temperature. It does help carry heat away from your body, lowering it's temperature (unless, of course, you're in a room hotter than your body and need more than a fan).

Forget the rules and try both ways. If there's a difference, run it that way. If no difference don't worry about it.

Then it must have an "evaporator" like refrigerators have to "boil" the water back into the house - which sure doesn't make a lot of sense.

Having the air blowing across you allows the body's normal cooling system to function -- more air means more cooling. To me that means down in the summer and up in the winter. Of course if you have too small a fan or run it too slowly or the air stream isn't actually getting to you (e.g.: air is coming down in the middle of the room and you are sitting in a far corner) it isn't going to do much.

Space heater??? Are you outta your mind !?! The dehumidifier is more than j ust a spaceheater. The idea is to draw air through a heat sink (evaporator) at a temperature cooler than dew point, causing the water vapor to condens e out of the air stream. The water is diverted to a collection tank and the air stream is passed through a second heat exchanger, running only slightl y warmer than room temperature, in order to "dry" the air by raising its te mperature and thereby decreasing its relative humidity. The thing you're mi ssing is the process is simply returning the heat removed from the incoming air stream and returning it to the output airstream. There will be a resid ual heating of about 10-20% more due to less than perfectly efficient opera tion of course, but it is way less than a heater operation.

You are not getting my point. The AC, if oversized, moves a lot of air over the cold colil for a short amount of time while drawing large amount of current and removing a small amount of humidity.

A smaller A/C moves less air over the cold coil for a longer period of time, and moves more air to reduce the temperature by the same amount, using less power to do so. so it removes more moisture for the same amount of current drawn. The BTU/watt efficiency may very well be the same - or the big one may even be more efficient - but the efficiency as a dehumidifier is significantly better on the smaller A/C unit.

If it is not cool enough to require air conditioning, but is too humid for comfort, running a small de-humidifier is a LOT more efficient than running the big-assed air conditioner AND the furnace!!!!

Only a total idiot would run the AC and heat at the same time to reduce the humidity in the house.

As for the de-humidifier producing heat - it only produced a fraction of it's total power consumption as heat output. The heat coming off the back of the unit is just heat removed from the air (and moisture) entering the front of the unit. The latent heat of vaporization/condensation of the water removed is the only appreciable "heat" produced. (971 BTU/lb) So for every US gallon of water removed, aproxemately 8000 BTU.

If it takes 12 hours to remove a gallon, that is 672 btu/hr or less than 200 watts.

Trust, but verify is how I operate. That usually means figuring out how things work before making a judgment. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept your observations quite yet. Color me undecided.

Ok, that makes sense for AZ. However, they still specify a presumably reflective light color, not a dark black asphalt surface that would absorb heat.

The US Dept of Energy version:

It's not the radiation into the night sky. It's the lack of clouds to trap the hot air between the ground and the cloud layer that makes a clear night sky rather cold.

Not quite. White is worn outside in the summer, with gray or black in the winter. While dark clothes do get hotter on the surface, they are somewhat cooler on the inside. The clothes are worn loosely where the vertical temperature differential sets up a convective vertical air flow. The inner layer traps much of the sweat against the skin, which is cooled by the convective air flow. Much of the sweat remains trapped against the skin, thus reducing overall water loss. The outer layers provide air pockets, which offer some insulation value. If the clothes are worn tightly, it doesn't work. Dark clothes also loose heat faster than light clothes and are therefore worn indoors.

I do much the same thing. At night, I leave the house partly open so that it cools down. In the morning, I close all the doors and windows to trap in the cold air. At about noon, the house warms up to the same as outside temperature, so I open with windows.

Water doesn't dribble out of it because there is a drain line from the air handler to the outside. It doesn't remove ALL the water vapor...how much depends upon air temperature and humidity.

I didn't say they didn't have them, I said they weren't popular or commonly available. That is true. Hell, I had to buy my first ones - Hunters - from a company called "Fly Fan"...their customers were butchers and vendors in open markets that bought them to shoo away flies.

Heat pumps defy the laws of physics? If the air is cooled it changes how much moisture it has in it. Take some time to learn how it works.

I got two fans from an old guy in the 70's and at that point the fans were already really old. Judging by the (largely absent) electrical safety measures pre-WW2 but certainly consumer-grade. I ended up throwing them away because the plastic in the blades looked like an imminent failure waiting to happen. Don't remember what it was (bakelite?). With a large fan the results of a failure could be nasty. It looked cool though.

Confucscious say only Muslim ceiling fan blow up.

-- . Christopher A. Young Learn about Jesus

Sounds like time for Obama to issue EO.

I'd expect him to rule that all fans should turn to the left.

Not one to turn down a chance to blow up.

ROFL! Luckily I had just finished the glass of chocolate milk, otherwise I'd be cleaning now.

They were almost unheard of north of the Mason Dixon into the late sixties or seventies. South of the Mason Dixon they were popular in the early 1900s

You have stone flooring in your living space?

Unless you run an evaporative cooler like we do. Best invention since pivot irrigation.

One has to get used to it. I feel much more comfortable than with traditional A/C but we have to make sure to always use coasters for drinks such as beer that just came out of the fridge. Else there'll be ugly water stains developing on the table.

Our house (California) was built in 1970. It always had a ceiling fan in the living room. Even older ones did, sometimes on the patio, gets hot out here in the summer.

India had them a couple hundred years earlier, hand-operated and with bio-degradable blades: