BLACK+DECKER BDT70WT 70 Pint Portable Dehumidifier

I bought this unit almost 3 years ago to use in the basement of a vacation home that often wasn't used for weeks at a time. It ran every winter from October through April 24/7 and worked great. then it started icing up so severe that it would take a day or two for the ice to melt with the unit turned off. I experimented with different locations/settings but it still seemed to do it, not consistently but just enough I was concerned about leaving it on unattended. I finally contacted the manufacture Black & Decker to see if it might be the compressor which has a 5 year warranty. When I described the problem, the agent said it would be covered under the warranty and I'd be receiving instructions from his supervisor via e-mail on how to return and get a replacement item. Over the next 5 weeks including 2 more phone calls and direct contact to customer services via their web site, each time I was assured information would be forthcoming; however, it's been well over 2 months and I'm now convinced their approach is to never honor the warranty, but keep promising me action until I give up and write this review. Now you ask why did I give the product 3 starts - well it's because with such constant and reliable use for over 2 years the item performed extremely well so I'd give it 4 stars, but the customer service I'd give zero stars.

My apartment complex replaced all of the windows on the property with really crappy ones so ever since then I've had a moisture issue. My apartment was around 70%+ humidity in every room give or take 5% all the time. This has managed to bring the humidity down to around 40% which is awesome...but it really only works where there's no doors in between it and the moisture, so it doesn't work at the moisture in my bedroom because the door is closed. Otherwise though it's really powerful. I only have to run it overnight about 3-4 nights a week to keep the humidity under control which is great. It is kind of loud though, and produces quite a bit of a breeze, so I run it at night when I'm sleeping so it doesn't interfere with what I'm doing. It's very powerful though and is really easy to empty. Overall I'm happy with the purchase, it's doing exactly what I wanted it to do. I only wish it would bring the humidity down in my entire apartment, even with doors closed, as the whole apartment is only 800 sq. ft. but I have two smaller ones in my bedroom and I'm ok with that.

I just purchased this unit and it seems to be working just fine. I am, however, deducting a star for an extremely poorly written instruction manual.The control panel has preset modes (Living Area, Basement, etc) but nowhere in the manual does it explain what the presets are. They actually represent different humidity levels but you're on your own figuring out just what those levels are.The instruction writer also fails to differentiate between the "Continuous" preset (which means the unit just cranks away without regard for the humidity level) and "continuous draining" and treats them as the same thing - i.e. they tell you to attach a hose and set the unit to "Continuous" which actually sets it to run nonstop.Some minor things to note: the air intake on this unit is on the back which means it cannot be placed against a wall. The exhaust is on the right side. I replaced a Frigidaire unit with front intake so this required some rearrangement (since I use the units with continuous discharge into a drain).Finally, like the Frigidaire models, the continuous drain function requires that the unit be absolutely level - if it is off just slightly the water will end up in the bucket and the unit will eventually shut off. It would be nice if someone would make a unit with a way to set it permanently to continuous drain.

I bought four of these “BLACK+DECKER BDT70WT 70 Pint Energy Star Portable Dehumidifier” units to dry up the crawl space under my house after a flood. They don’t seem to work well at all in this application.While waiting to get them set up under house, I did try out one in a bedroom with connected bathroom and closet. It did remove several buckets of water. So yesterday, I carefully set up and leveled two of them in the crawl space and provided a drain with proper slope for each with ½” PVC pipe from the hose fitting on back of the units.Initially, one of them was “making water”; but, after getting the second set up on the same 15A GFI electrical circuit they act weird and are not making water. The current that this combination of 2 humidifiers draws cycles between about 0.5A, 1.0A, and for a short period, 13.0A. I have set the controls for low fan and continuous operation. The initial humidity reading is 85 or 90 percent. I believe that the manual or nameplate say that they should draw 6.5A each. Why am I not seeing water come out of the drain pipes?I tested one by itself (see picture) with settings at power on and low fan. It drew 6 to 7A and filled the bucket but no water came out the drain pipe. I tried the forth with the cap on the drain pipe. It captured about 2.9 pints an hour in its bucket with the input air humidity measuring 80 percent.

We have only had this unit for 2 weeks, but so far we love it. We are using it in our basement and are amazed at how much moisture/water that it filtered out of the air. Running it on high you can notice an increase in temperature if the humidity outside is also high and it has to work hard to keep the humidity down. After an initial drying out we are now running it on low and it is still doing a fantastic job. We have used the bucket and pump feature so far and they have both worked just fine. There was one instance where we had it on pump mode and it shut off with the bucket full message so we just emptied the bucket, turned it off and back on and it has run normally since.Initially I had looked at buying some other units and had visited the home improvement stores, but wasn't happy with the selection they had in store for all of the features we wanted, mainly the pump and filter. After reviewing all of the selections on Amazon, settled on this unit and so far am very pleased with the purchase.