We were using this dehumidifier in the basement
and it worked just fine until it started leaking water
at the bottom even without the tank filling up all the way
and this is the second time this happened to me
with a dehumidifier like this so I thought I'd make a video
about fixing it. The first thing I have to do
is open it up.
I don't quite remember how this actually opens up.
So here's the inside of it, here's the fan,
and the compressor but I need to get this drip tray here,
which means I need to take the front cover off.
I just noticed this filter in here is really dirty.
I should clean that.
Much better. So normally water condenses
off of these cooling coils here and into this drip tray,
and then down into the tank. But I'm not sure
if that's working correctly now so let's just try this out.
Well the water is flowing where it's supposed to flow just fine.
So at the moment I'm not sure where the problem is.
What had happened on my other dehumidifier is that dust
will settle on here a little bit and run down with the water
into the drip tray and eventually it just built up
a bit of a sludge in there, and then the drip tray overflowed
without actually draining into the tank and it just flowed off
to the side and water spilled everywhere.
It could be that because the filter was so plugged up
there wasn't enough air flow and I was getting some ice build-up
on here which then when it melted didn't all go
into drip tray but just kind of flowed everywhere
so I'll put this back together and we'll see if that fixes it.
I set it up here in the basement and once again it made
a puddle underneath so I'm just going to leave it
running open like that and I can see there's some ice buildup
on the coils and to catch this happening in the act,
I've got Raspberry Pi with a camera module
taking a picture every two seconds
so I'll just let that run over night and we'll see what happens.
Looking at the time lapses, the humidifier would ice over
once or twice an hour and once it iced over, it would turn off
the refrigeration unit and then the water melted
and a whole bunch dribbled out the bottom.
After cleaning up the mess I put a dehumidifier on a tray
and raised it up a bit so I could see under it.
I want to see how to water managed to get the bottom
so I rigged it up to run without the tank.
And here's another defrost cycle you can see some of the water
coming out of a hole on the right but on the spout
on the left you can see most of it coming up the spout
but some of it dripping behind the spout as well.
So I couldn't really figure out where this other water
was coming from it would seem like it actually
came up the spout Nd then went up the back of it
and then down the other side but that was just unbelievable.
But when I put my finger up against the threaded spout,
the water ran down my finger and it no longer at the back,
so sure enough the water actually through surface tension
and propeller reaction or whatever managed to make it
down the other side and if it was tilted back ever so slightly,
it would just run all the way to the back and run down
behind the tank. I figured I could fix that
by making the end of the spout a little bit larger
so I took a cap for a hose, drilled a hole into it,
and screwed it on there, Nd so now the water would have
to go up much further to get behind the spout
and that seems to have fixed the problem.
Now I wasn't sure if this cap was quite sufficient
so I added a little bit of caulking right here
just to give that a low point so if the water does get to here
it'll dribble off of here instead of potentially running
down the back and the hole on this side
I plugged it up with caulking and it made the caulking stick
down a little bit so again if there's water that comes out here
it'll dribble down here instead of potentially running
down the back. Let's give this a quick test
without the cap just to see if the caulking on its own
would work.
So by dripping off of here it wouldn't run all the way
to the back and past the tank. I noticed there's quite a gap
between the condenser and evaporator on this unit,
and quite a bit of air flowed between those
and plugging it up with a little bit of foam
actually made a measurable difference in the air flow
near the edges.
And testing it with that changed the dehumidifier still iced up
but only about half as often as before.