This dehumidifier is just what my home desperately needed (and it's on sale)

Maria Diaz/ZDNET

I test many smart home products -- some of them essential, others not so much. But a dehumidifier didn't seem essential to me until I tried the Gasbye dehumidifier. This powerful dehumidifier is 21% off, available at $250 during Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days.

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For some reason, my home's main bathroom doesn't have an exhaust fan or windows. It's an open-concept layout in the main bedroom, but it gets humid, especially when my husband and I shower back to back. Setting up the Gasbye dehumidifier in that bathroom was an eye-opening experience. 

The humidity consistently ranged from 70% to 80%, so the dehumidifier automatically got to work. The 1.7-gallon tank filled up in just under 24 hours. That's almost two gallons of water taken from the air in our bathroom in under a day.

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Living in the south, my home has a lot of humidity. It's common to see the outdoor humidity creep up into the 90s without a cloud in sight, so it also creeps up inside the home. Ideal indoor humidity levels should stay around 30% and 50%; when it dips lower than that, it can cause discomfort and skin dryness, any higher, and it encourages mold growth, which nobody wants.

Maria Diaz/ZDNET

The biggest test for the Gasbye dehumidifier was the downstairs open-concept living area, adjacent to a very humid sunroom. The Gasbye drew 1.7 gallons of water from our home's air in eight hours. 

This area is about 1,000 square feet, and the Gasbye's capacity is 4,500 square feet.

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Since then, I run the Gasbye in "Comfort" mode in said living area, keeping the humidity controlled but comfortable. It also features a customizable Normal level, Turbo, or Continuous, accessed on the touch panel along the top. You can also set it with a timer, enable and disable a child lock, or easily see when the tank is full on the same panel. 

The Gasbye dehumidifier provides powerful humidity control and includes a hose with a maximum of 115 pints daily, so it could also work in a basement.