Before I bought my own flat a few years ago, I briefly shared one with a girl who did not care for ventilation. Any window that I might open in the course of cooking or showering would be swiftly shut once she got wind of it. I suppose there must have been extractor fans in the flat but I don't remember them successfully extracting anything, for every evening I would return to a wall of humidity that hit me as soon as I opened the front door. It was both tangible on the skin and also disturbingly redolent of the day's activities. The combined smell of showers, cooking and air-dried laundry is something that still lingers with me, as indeed it lingered there. And it wasn't just a sensory problem – one day I pulled a chest of drawers out from a wall to find the entire area behind it was black with mould.
From that point on, I became fanatical about open windows and well-ventilated rooms, but when the world outside your house is constantly wet (as it usually is in an English winter), an open window is not enough to win the war against moisture. From October on, laundry that takes three days to dry and sheets that feel just a tiny bit damp can become par for the course. Central heating helps, of course, but sometimes it's not quite cold enough to put it on, or it creates a disagreeable stuffiness. And while a tumble dryer would be the dream, who has room for one of those in a small London flat?
If you're in the same boat, then the virtues of a dehumidifier cannot be exaggerated. As you might surmise, these machines suck in damp air, cool it and gather the water in a tank for you to empty out. In addition to their many other charming qualities, they make it easy for you to see just how much water was floating around in the air before you turned it on, which is rather fascinating. Many dehumidifiers also function as air purifiers, which is equally, er, absorbing, as you can see the white filter gradually turning grey as it sucks in pollution.
Mine is a 10-litre Meaco model from John Lewis – this is around the smallest size you can buy, and currently comes in at £160. It is designed to bring the atmosphere down to around 50% humidity on its standard setting, but there is also a ‘smart laundry’ setting which aims for 35% humidity, thus upping the power on the fan and drying your clothes more quickly. Even in a small flat like mine (around 450 square feet), it won't dry out the entire flat, but I tend to move it from room to room as required. For drying laundry, it works best when it and the clothes are closeted in a small space (remember to shut the window), but it has done a brilliant job of drying thick towels overnight in the middle of a wet November, which was an inconceivable feat without it. Of course you could just get a heated drying rack, but it is nice that the dehumidifier can be used for multiple purposes – I use it in addition to the extractor fan to dry the bathroom quickly after a shower, and to keep my sitting room dry after an unfortunate floor warping incident back in a rainy August.
There are few downsides to my new damp-fighting ally: it's not the most beautiful object, it's true, but it has a slim profile and finds an inconspicuous home in the hallway when it's not in use, plus I'm so fond of it that I can forgive it anything. It is quiet too – impossible to hear when it's in a different room, and even if it's hanging out with me in the sitting room, it just generates a pleasing level of white noise. And unlike tumble dryers it's cheap to run: just 4p an hour on its usual setting. If there is a negative to it, it's that I've become a dehumidifier bore – I recently found myself holding forth on the subject at a work Christmas party. So apologies to anyone I meet socially in the foreseeable future, but really – you should get one.
