As summer weather turns hotter and more humid, more consumers are discovering their dehumidifiers aren't as trusty as those in basements past.
People who used to get decades of service from a dehumidifier are often getting only one to three summers before their machines quit. In recent years, millions of dehumidifiers have been recalled as fire hazards. And prematurely dead or recalled dehumidifiers are piling up at recycling agencies.
"We get thousands of them every year," said Mike Larson, sales manager at J.R.'s Advanced Recyclers in Inver Grove Heights. "They're hardly ever older than three years. Ten to 15 years ago, we didn't see nearly as many and the ones we got were a lot older."
J.R.'s, one of the Twin Cities' largest recyclers, took in more than 6,500 dehumidifiers in the past year, he said. Nationally, about 2 million dehumidifiers were recycled in 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency reported. That's nearly twice the number that were tossed each year from 2007 to 2014.
John Zeien, co-owner of J.R.'s, blames cheaper materials. Like other appliance recyclers, he's seeing more dehumidifiers that have been used for one to three years.
"We take them apart and they're rusted," he said. "There's a metal bracket next to aluminum coils that caused it to corrode. Manufacturers are using less material. The whole product has been cheapened."
Manufacturers also shipped twice as many new dehumidifiers in the past 13 years (23.2 million from 2003 to 2016) than they did from 1989 to 2002 (12.2 million), according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, a trade group.
Jill Notini, vice president of communications for the group, attributed the sales increase to the rising number of U.S. households and changing weather patterns. She said the group hasn't heard complaints about the working life of dehumidifiers. "I get a lot of consumer phone calls, but none saying the dehumidifiers aren't lasting as long," Notini said.