Our Favorite Dehumidifier

Our basement is where the laundry lives, and with eight people generating it, that room works overtime. It always carried a damp, musty edge — the kind of smell that gets into stored clothes and makes you wonder what’s happening behind the boxes. Cracking a window did nothing, and we were tired of the clammy feeling every time someone went down to switch a load.

What dried it out for good is the Midea Cube 20-pint dehumidifier. Mom loves that the Cube design tucks into a closet and empties without spills — the top section nests down into the base when you’re not using the full height, so it hides away instead of dominating the room. It pulls a genuinely satisfying amount of water out of the air, and emptying the tank is a clean, tidy job rather than a sloshing mess across the floor.

We compared traditional boxy dehumidifiers and a couple of pricier units, but the Midea won on the details that matter in a packed house. The collapsible shape means it isn’t one more bulky thing eating floor space we don’t have, and the option to run a hose for continuous drain means we can genuinely set it and forget it. At around $159.99 it landed in the reasonable middle, and the difference in that basement — and in how our stored clothes smell — was obvious within days.