Bought a $200 dehumidifier for my 28-foot sailboat and it fried my battery bank

Thought I was being smart keeping the mildew off my cabin walls. Hooked it up to the house batteries and ran it overnight while I was docked in Clearwater. Woke up to dead batteries and a $400 replacement bill cause the thing pulled way more amps than I expected. Anyone else have a power hog gadget that seemed innocent until it wasn't?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenixh7417d ago

Did you check the specs before plugging it in? I remember reading somewhere that a lot of those portable dehumidifiers are really just small air conditioners in disguise, and they can draw 70 to 100 watts or more. On a 28 foot boat with a typical house battery setup, that's a big drain overnight. My buddy did the same thing with a portable fan he thought was low draw, but it was pulling 50 amps and killed his batteries in a few hours. Lesson is, always do the math on watts and amps before you hook anything sensitive up.

the_jennifer17d ago

@phoenixh74 oh man, you are spot on. That's exactly what happened to a buddy of mine last summer. He picked up a cheap dehumidifier for his 30 foot sailboat thinking it would be a small draw. Hooked it up before checking anything, went to bed, and woke up to a dead battery bank. Turns out that thing was pulling like 90 watts constant. His house batteries were only 200 amp hours total, so it drained them down to nothing in like 8 hours. He had to run his generator for half the day just to get the system back up. Now he labels everything with the actual amp draw before plugging it into the 12v system, haha.