01-23-2011, 02:00 AM
My experience with dehumidifiers has been that, mostly, you might as well run a normal (make the room air cold, instead of hot) air conditioner - not only can you use the space while it's being conditioned, but overall the space tends to dry out better. Roll-in dehumidifiers are easier to set up temporarily than a good a/c unit, and cheaper in that way, but a wall unit A/C or a slightly fancier "ductless" unit will do the air-drying job quite well.
It's a slippery slope - the more you run A/C, the more stuff you tend to accumulate that needs that conditioned air. In my "ideal" home, I'd have A/C in the office with the computer and whatever else I just can't live without that doesn't like humidity, keep the rest of the house open to the breeze and don't fill it with stuff that would be ruined from a mildew bloom.
An empty room with high gloss paint on the walls and ceiling and a sealed wood floor isn't very likely to bloom mildew in the first place, and if it does, it's a very quick and easy job to get it off. Throw in a sofa and a couple of chairs and it just gets a little more likely to happen and harder to clean. Pile it floor to ceiling with books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, curtains, blankets, pillows, and bric-a-brac, and now you need to run that A/C or you will get a mold outbreak, and it will be a total nightmare to clean.
My first house was nice and simple when I moved in, just me, a waterbed, a few pieced of donated furniture and my clothes. The ex-owner's cat came to visit once in awhile and I would have to vacuum out the fleas from the one carpeted room a few weeks later. I almost never ran the A/C, my electric bills were more customer charge than they were usage charge. Fast forward 10 years, fill it up with accumulated crap, a wife and a baby. The cats are banned from the house because we can't get the fleas out anymore, the A/C runs full-time 12 months a year, and we even had the 60amp meter can catch on fire because the previous owners had installed a 100amp breaker box behind it, and between the A/C, water heater, electric clothes dryer and everything else, we were overloading one of the branches enough to get smell of smoke from the burning wire insulation.
So, I guess it's all in how you want to live. I want to live simply, but somehow am having a hard time getting back there.