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Though my garage is unheated it is extremely well insulated.
This allows all snow brought in to melt from engine heat and the space is perpetually damp in the winter.
Just wondering; at what temperature would the coils in a dehumidifier freeze up and (I assume) become ineffective?
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Clearly, they would freeze at 32F, so the dehumifier could operate so as keep its coil slightly above that. If so, it will only help when the air temp is above about 40F is the dehumidifier going to do anything.
Or the dehumidifier could avoid freezing simply by having a small refrigeration component that would never, in normal use cool more than 20-25 degrees. Fine for a humid 70-90F summer day, but it would freeze up below about 55 or 60F.
So either way the dehumidifer is configured, it is not going to help when your garage is at 30F to 40F which it must be if there's snow around and it's not heated.
The salt crystals (sold to sailors and in hardware store for musty closets) would work but that's an expensive and bothersome way to remove a few pountds of water (have to haul out the resulting brine).
If the garage is very well-insulated, why not add some heat? Wall-mount, direct-vent gas (propane or natural gas) units are easy to install and a few hundred $. A warm, de-iced car would be a wonderful change from what you're doing now.
I can imagine a zeolite-based dehumidifier that cycles automatically between dehumidifying and regenerating the adsorbant beds. But the operating cost would approach the use of a heat and capital would greatly exceed the other options. Viable if you need to produce dry air (for compressed instrument air, prior to air separation, etc.), but not for a garage. Get a heater installed. -David
*Dave, thanks for your interest!My question is actually the preliminary steps in getting heat out there. The biggest concern being a moist, WARM atmosphere causing my metallic possessions to revert to their natural states.The house has baseboard heat and I thought of using PEX tubing to run a zone out there to a Modine (the PEX to guard against burst pipes in the event a garage door is left open). Would that be the way to go?Then...get the space dehumidified.
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Though my garage is unheated it is extremely well insulated.
This allows all snow brought in to melt from engine heat and the space is perpetually damp in the winter.
Just wondering; at what temperature would the coils in a dehumidifier freeze up and (I assume) become ineffective?