You should buy a dehumidifier. It will almost certainly improve your home environment. Pulling moisture from the air helps banish condensation and mold, making it cheaper and easier to regulate the temperature in your house or apartment. There’s a reason the chatter about dehumidifiers has grown so loud and sales are soaring; it’s because they work.

Whether you’ve seen a persuasive Reddit thread, a life hack on TikTok, or an expert guide to the best dehumidifiers, the hype is real. I live in Scotland, where it’s dark and damp for months every year. We even have a word for the weather: dreich (which means dreary and bleak). We also have a mix of poorly ventilated and poorly insulated homes that we heat twice a day. The result is windows soaked with condensation and black mold galore.

I’ve been using a dehumidifier for the last year, across two quite different homes, and it’s one of my favorite appliances. I’m never going back to the damp life. My Meaco dehumidifier might be the hardest-working device in my home. It’s not perfect—I’ll get to the downsides—but first, let me explain why I love it.

Depressing Damp

Photograph: Simon Hill

Most of the homes I lived in for the first 40 years of my life were damp. Many had single glazing, limited insulation, and solid stone or brick walls with no cavity. Combine that with gas central heating, which heats the home quickly but is used sparingly, usually twice a day, and you have temperatures that spike and rapidly fall, making the perfect breeding ground for condensation and mold. Cold and damp homes are a serious problem in the UK.

For a long time, I thought wet windows and black mold in corners were just normal. I’ll never forget when we moved out of our last flat in Edinburgh. When I pulled the double bed with the big headboard away from the wall, it was completely covered in black mold. I had been feeling ill for a while, and when I looked it up, I had all the symptoms of black mold exposure. I was completely ignorant about damp risks.

Our first real home as a married couple with young kids was a modern construction, with double glazing, proper insulation, and effective central heating, and it was the warmest home I’ve ever lived in. But, because there were no drafts, condensation appeared on the windows every morning. Cooking and drying laundry would make it worse, but opening windows during the winter made it too cold and expensive to reheat.

I read about the potential benefits of a dehumidifier and decided to try it. Immediately, the condensation was gone, but the other big benefit was drying clothes indoors.

Dry Laundry

Photograph: Simon Hill

I know you’re not supposed to do this, but I grew up putting clothes on the radiators to dry. Or we’d use a clothes airer in the hall. In some of the flats I lived in, it took days for a pair of jeans to get dry, and there was a constant musty smell. But there was no tumble dryer and often no or limited access to outside space for hanging clothes outdoors.