Lou1985 posted:How wet/damp are your guys basements getting? I have a house built in 1956. The basement has tile over the concrete floor but no drywall (you can see the brick). It's about about 4 feet below ground (9 foot ceilings as the basement extends above ground level, common in Chicago). It has forced air heat/air conditioning. Basement is about 65°-75° all year with 50%-60% humidity (like the rest of the house). I have no rust issues. Track/wheels on the trains never rust. Heck I left some bare sheet metal from a project down in the basement for a month and it never even got surface rust. I figure as long as basement conditions are close to the rest of the house a dehumidifier is a waste of money. 50%-60% humidity shouldn't make your trains rust. Plus at that level static electricity is limited, which is a plus around electronics.
A couple of comments (not about the post per se, but about humidity/what works on it)
1)basement humidity is dependent on a number of factors, one of the big ones is the nature of the property the house is on. Below grade rooms tend to have more humidity then the rest of the house (moist air, among other things, kind of tends to sink to the lowest level), but also a lot of people (like myself) live in places with high water tables, and that can cause moisture to seep into the basement.
2)In many houses, the basement is not heated or cooled. In the case of the poster I quoted, they have forced hot air in the basement and a/c, and that is likely why the basement is kept in that range. Force hot air heat, as I know only too well, dries out the air (the furnaces put out water, that is sent to drains), in winter my house if I didn't have humidifiers would be like 25-30%. Likewise, air conditioners don't just cool the air, they also dehumidify it (many room air conditioners have a de-humidifier mode that basically mimics what a dehumidifier does). When the air is cooled down in the A/C it can hold less humidity, and the water condenses out of the air (ever look at a window a/c, with the water dripping out? Condensation from the air. So basically the heat and a/c are doing what a dehumidifier would do.
50-60% humidity is fine, but few basements will keep that without some method of dehumidification or bringing in drier air, whether it is a dehumidifier, am air exchanger that brings down drier air from the rest of the house, or an hvac system working there. In winter I don't have to run my dehumidifier, between the lower temperatures and likely the drying of the air from the heat in the rest of the house, it stays around 50%, I only have trouble when it warms up in the spring-summer-early fall months.
