eli5: how do dehumidifiers make water from air?
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Its condensation. You know when you have a cold glass of liquid on a hot day drops of water form on the outside of the glass? This is water vapor condensing out of warm humid air.
A dehumidifier works this way. It uses mechanical compression and expansion to create cold coils – these condense water out of the ambient air as it cools. But we had to move the heat from the cold coils somewhere, so else where there is a hot coil, part of the same fluid circuit.
In an air conditioner you’d blow this now cool (and dryer) air back into the room and you blow OTHER air over the hot coils to remove that heat and blow that hot air it out the window (or you blow outside air over the hot coils which you have outside). In a dehumidifier you run the now cool dry air back through the hot coils to pick up the heat again so its the same temperature as it was coming in.
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