So… Florida in the summer is no fun. Summer in the garage in the summer is rough to say the least… Anyone use a dehumidifier or AC? I have a portable AC, but keep thinking a dehumidifier may be better. The portable AC definitely doesn’t “cool” by any stretch in there. We keep it for. hurricanes to cool a interior room on a generator.
Thoughts???
Renting in Northern Virginia where the central ac doesn’t reach the top floor very well. The basement can be freezing and the upstairs hasn’t changed. We purchased a dehumidifier instead of a mobile ac unit and it’s made things much more pleasant. It was a quarter of the cost of a portable ac unit. It fills up the 35 pint in under a day.
Wow, that is quite a bit of water removed.
A concern I would have in a garage is generally they are not well sealed, and likely there is a lot of air exchange with the outside, which would work against any cooling or de-humidifying done inside the garage.
I live up north and as is common in basement land, have always used a dehumidifier in my basements for general humidity reduction. Dehumidifiers work great for reducing excess humidity and suck an impressive amount of water out of the air. But they put out a decent amount of heat in the process. That heat actually is fine in the basement as its freezing down there when the AC is on (and cold in the winter) but, that heat could be quite problematic in a Pain Cave. I’d defer to anyone who has actual experience but be aware it could end up being a net minus if you lower the humidity a bit but make your pain cave hotter.
FWIW - AC and dehumidifiers work with basically the same process but an AC unit is set up to dump the heat outside. In fact, AC was first invented to control humidity and the cooling was just a bonus.
Exactly. As @toyman said, a garage is just not insulated enough. You’ll be wasting electricity for little benefit. Just buy a bunch of fans or train indoors if you can’t handle the heat/humidity outdoors.
I had a similar idea for my garage but it just doesn’t work in practice.
I’m also a south Floridian and I use a dehumidifier, the portable a/c is a pain in the 
to get set up properly in my garage. I try to be on the bike by 7am and the latest I’ll stay is 10:30-11am. It gets too hot as you know, also using cold/ frozen water bottles to sip helps during summer.
I have a huge fan that is almost on top of me for cooling. 30”fan with a cut piece of pvc pipe to angle it. Took me a while to figure the best angle but it works! It’s one of these bad boys from Home Depot for $275……make sure you get plenty of salt and electrolytes afterwards!
I’m going to disagree with some comments above: I have a big window unit in my garage, and it cools the place down pretty fast. Ambient temps have been 80’s and 90’s here lately. Very easy to get it cooler and dryer than the much more insulated basement where we have a dehumidifier running 24x7, and I can start it up with fans when I start my workout and it’s really fine.
Advantage of a properly sized AC is that it cools and dehumidifies. But, you need to make sure it’s appropriately sized or oversized for the space it’s in though, and those portable units aren’t as efficient as window units and definitely not as efficient as a mini-split.
For the record - it gets run while I’m in there working out or working on something, not all the time.
That makes sense. Ive been thinking about framing out a area for the trainer, next to a window that we could actually insulate and run a small AC. We’ll see… That’s a winter project.
Was wondering if some of you with experience with dehumidifiers can weigh in on a question…my wife has MS and humidity just wreaks havoc with her. Makes all her symptoms worse and walking is a challenge on a good day. Humid days just kill her…
We keep the house very cool to help her as much as possible (I often have to wear a sweatshirt inside during the summer), but even then the humidity can be tough. I am considering putting a portable dehumidifier downstairs as well if that would suck more of the humidity out of the air……
Also, how noisy are they?
Thanks…
Only two advantages to a dehumidifier:
you can leave it running where if you left the AC running as long you would get too cold
You can run a smaller dehumidifier in that portable ac units tend to reduce the insulation of the space a bit and so seem to not cool very well.
As STP said, the only difference is where the heat is dumped. But remember the unit generates heat when running so with AC heat from the space and unit gets dumped outside vs all the heat going inside.
This was my first thought. My basement flooded 2 weeks ago so I’ve been running a borrowed dehumidifier down there since. It’s noticeable hot in the basement when I open the door and the dehumidifier running. Previously it was kind of refreshing to walk down there on a hot day and now a few times it feels warmer in the basement than outside.
I use a small single room type portable ac unit in my shop, 30*40 with 16ft ceilings so way undersized (but was free). Makes a noticeable difference in comfort on 80+ degree days.
I’d definitely go with either a portable ac or a window unit for use with the trainer. Mini split will be more up front but more efficient so hopefully cheaper to run long term. And might even have option for timers or app control to pre condition the space.
Florida is tough. Evaporative coolers don’t work because the humidity is too high. Fans just blow humid air around. Best bet is a regular air conditioner unit (through the wall or window, or mini-split) blowing right on you, but it’s going to be expensive to buy and run.
(Portable AC units just aren’t very good)
Very true
I live in Japan, and I reckon the climate is very similar to Florida: very hot and humid. (The weather app shows 100 % today …) We have a dehumidifier in our bedroom and an AC in our living room, which is also where I train. No way I could survive with a humidifier and fans. Even with the AC on, I sweat buckets in the summer (I have to drink about 1,3 l = 2 large bottles per hour to give you an idea).
With ACs it also depends on whether you have central AC or small units meant for individual rooms — we have the latter. The issue of insulation that others have mentioned is important, though: many homes in the “southern 2/3” of Japan lack insulation, so once you switch off your AC, usually the temperature rises very quickly. Despite that, I think an AC is your best bet.
Bumping seasonally related thread since people will probably start looking into this and also I have actual data now since my co2 monitor also records temp and relative humidity.
TLDR (because this will be long) Dehumidifier is working amazing, dropping RH 30% + and recovery after workout very fast. But raised the temp in paincave significantly 5F +. The increased temp is noticeable even at the start of a ride and mentally not the best, but the lower RH seems to help with my cooling and resulting in a much drier ride, shirt not soaked, towel on bars dry, no puddle on the floor. Main takeaway, we probably need AC.
I have moved since my post above in 2022 so my old basement that flooded which was not something you could train in (1850s low ceiling dirty mess) and now in a finished basement. The basement is heated but does not have air conditioning, spray foamed walls so humidity easily gets trapped. Even though temps stayed comfortable (lower than our conditioned space) last summer the humidity was noticeably high making it borderline uncomfortable in the warmer months even just watching tv. While we may eventually do mini splits our first goal was sort the humidity. In the winter I was having condensation issues on the windows after working out so we also needed a year round solution.
The unit I bought is oversized for the space (says 3k sqft) which is little under 500sqft for the 3 finished rooms. 11x11 (x2, gym and office) and 11x20 (tv room). There is also an unfinished 11x20 space but my testing shows that the dehumidifier is having no impact on that space ( ugh need a second one). But set to 40% is running nearly full time and filling the 35 pint capacity in about a day, this is with no working out and only someone in the basement a few hours a day in the evenings. This cycles from about 45 on to 35 off for that 40% setting. Set to 35% it runs constantly.
It is currently setup for the past few weeks in my gym since that is where the humidity is generated but also it is loud so can’t put it in the TV room, the other room ( my office) doesn’t back up to the unfinished space in a way I can eventually set it up to auto drain.
So this first pic shows baseline of the gym (didn’t workout for a few days) call it 60%. Then friday the 30th I did a workout and it shot up to 77% peak right before the end of the workout. It didn’t even recover back to the baseline and stuck a few % above baseline after. Saturday the 31st I bought the dehumidifer and set it up. You can see how quickly this dropped the RH from the 60s down to the 30s!
unfortunately you can also see that the temp never fully recovered after the workout but then went up and stayed up after the dehumidifier was placed in the room.
Here is data from a ride yesterday.
You can see the starting temp is already above the max temp of my pre dehumidifier ride, but change in temp is only about 5 degrees or so, so about the same.
Humidity though is very much in check, the change during the workout is minimal and the recovery is insanely fast. I believe that noted peak of 53% was me realizing I had not drained it so it had shut off for a bit. It usually recovers with an the hour from that.
you can see that from peak during the workout and peak of its cycling on and off under normal conditions the RH only raised by about 5%. I could see during my ride that the humidity was very much staying in check.
As I said in the TLDR it definitely changed the workout. I normally don’t turn my fans on for 10-15 minutes but with that starting temp I had turned them on by about 3 minutes in. This base temp is only going to get worse as the summer progresses and may be too much and even with lower humidity may make the TV room uncomfortable in a different way. But man I was so much dryer. I’m normally stripping my shirt off once the cool down starts and throwing a soggy mess across the room into my laundry basket, my shirt was dry. I went to take my towel off the bars to hang on the saddle to dry out… dry. I can’t quite describe the feeling, my brain was saying the room is hot so you are hotter, but I also knew I was shedding the heat better since the room was dryer.
catch 22 seems that we now need AC to combat the heat from the dehumidifier…
Technically speaking, a dehumidifier and an AC are the same thing, just packaged differently. An AC is a heat pump that cools one heat exchanger used to cool interior air, while heating up another used to dissipated the heat removed from the interior. Interior air is blown over the cold heat exchanger and exterior air is blown over the hot heat exchanger. The cool heat exchanger, as a side effect, condenses moisture out of the interior air so also functions to dehumidify the air.
A dehumidifier packages and vents both heat exchangers in the same box. Air blown over the cold heat exchanger is cooled and dehumidified as in the AC, but then it is used to cool the hot heat exchanger. If the process was 100% efficient, the output would be dehumidified air at the same temperature. Since it is not, the result is dehumidified air at a higher temperature.
Ultimately, an AC will both cool and dehumidify interior air, so is likely a better more energy efficient solution.
