Inofia 30-Pints Dehumidifier Review

This dehumidifier from Inofia has a smooth, gentle appearance that won’t look out of place in an office or doctor’s surgery. Depending on where you plan to use it, this may be pretty important. After all, you can’t just drape a cloth over a humidifier no matter how ugly it is: this will at best stop it from working efficiently and at worse shorten its lifespan.

In the case of this appliance, air is sucked in through a grille at the rear and vented upwards after being processed. Like many dehumidifiers, it needs about eight inches of clearance at the intake. Despite the Inofia being relatively compact, a design that breathes in from the front (for example the Tosot) may be better if you have very limited space to work with. We’ve mainly covered their updated 70 pint/day model here, but the 30-pint model is nearly as space efficient as this Inofia.

One Major Hassle

This sleek exterior comes, to some extent, at the cost of usability. This dehumidifier’s water tank sits at the rear of the unit, which may make emptying it less straightforward. Worse, it’s wedged in around the compressor, leaving it with a capacity of only 4 pints.

Housing a fairly potent dehumidifier in a compact body is certainly nothing to sneeze at. However, since this machine is supposed to produce as much as 30 pints of water per day under very warm, wet conditions, just keeping the Inofia running during summer sounds like almost like a full-time job. Depending on your local climate, the Vacplus 1901 (with a 6½ pint capacity) or 30-pint Tosot (about 1 gallon) might be better alternatives.

Both of these, as well as this Inofia, also allow you to hook up a drain hose. Neither includes a pump, though, so depending on your setup, this may mean having to drill a hole in an exterior wall or installing a shelf to elevate the appliance.

Everything You Really Need

Even without using a hose (which is included, by the way), it’s unlikely that you’ll have to empty the catchment reservoir a dozen times a day. Most dehumidifier manufacturers measure their products’ moisture-gathering capability by the efficiency standards published by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2012. Inofia, by contrast, uses a much more lenient assessment (95 °F and 90% RH as opposed to 80°F and 60%).

This is somewhat sneaky, but Vacplus and various other companies do the same, while many are still reluctant to advertise the (lower) figures their equipment can manage under the updated 2019 DoE rules. Comparing this machine’s power output with that of some similar appliances leads us to believe it should really be rated at around 20 pints/day. This corresponds well to the manufacturer’s recommendation of using it to dry an area of 1,000 square feet or less.

The control panel is a little less polished than that of the Vremi, but it does get the job done. As with most high-end dehumidifiers, it will stop operating when the water bucket is in danger of overflowing. It will also alert you to this with a light and buzzer (which unfortunately can’t be muted). It also weighs only 25 pounds and is therefore easy to carry around.

Plus a Little Extra

Furthermore, it features a Start After/Stop After timer, 2 fan speeds, auto defrost, can be set to maintain a relative humidity of 30% to 80% and restarts with its previous settings after a power outage. It’s also very quiet for a dehumidifier built around a compressor and, exceptionally, allows you to see the actual current ambient RH value. This gives you a greater sense of being in control and allows you to verify that it’s actually getting somewhere.

Finally, it comes with a 12-month warranty and has a rudimentary, washable mesh filter you should clean every 2 weeks or when visibly dirty. A single activated carbon filter, which at least in theory should be able to deal with odors and some airborne toxins, is also included, though replacements don’t seem to be available at this time.