Stuff Keeps Happening To Me

will a de-humidifier help?

I’m having one of those times when life just won’t give me a break.

First, the ongoing and tedious fallout from parking-gate (q.v.), then half-term, during which formless anxiety staged a hostile take-over of my entire nervous system, ruining the holiday for me and my family and possibly even other guests at the hotel.

We arrived back on Monday afternoon to family-wide panic about un-completed homework and a mysterious failure of the hot water system.

Then that same night Sam started throwing up and couldn’t stop. I don’t want to humiliate the poor kid but it became a sort of body-wide, critical collapse of sphincter control and I think at one point - about 4am on Tuesday morning - every single towel in the house was dirty.

“Is this typhoid?” he whispered. “Am I going to die?”

Reader, he did not die. He stopped throwing up at around 5am and was successfully rehydrated thanks to Berocca, Coca Cola and Knorr Chicken Noodle Soup. Meanwhile I turned in a series of substandard pieces of work and podcast appearances and cancelled radio commitments, due to laundry commitments and no sleep. I tried to ignore a troubling itchiness in my gums and my own mild, possibly psychosomatic, gut issues.

The ginormous laundry pile was diminishing, Sam was better, Kitty was fine, (Kitty is always basically fine). But world news continues to be terrible, frightening, doom-laden, claustrophobic. And then last night my husband started throwing up, although he managed to soil almost no towels, for which I am very grateful - particularly when I saw that Sam had a massive nosebleed in the night, requiring total sheet change no.5 within two days.

Anyway! I am not here to complain yes I am - but here to talk about dehumidifiers.

My laundry room is in our basement, which is damp - as basements are. In the winter it’s okay as there is a radiator that comes on. But in the summer it pretty much turns into a marshy bog and nothing dries.

Was the answer perhaps a de-humidifier? I really dithered over this, for months. I dreaded it becoming another white elephant of a piece of equipment, like the juicer or Sam’s golfball putting machine. I researched heavily, utilising my friend Charlotte’s subscription to Which? - (not sure if she knows I’m still logging on as her) - and came to the conclusion that this machine was the one for me. But, oh god, £285. Was I really going to do this? I caught a damp whiff of wet laundry from the basement.

Yes, yes I was going to do this. And, my friends, I can confidently report that the EcoAir DD1 Classic MK6 Dessicant Humidifier is the absolute business.

Not only does it eradicate all dampness from the damp laundry room, it dries laundry super-quick thanks to its dedicated laundry-drying function, much faster and more efficiently than a tumble drier AND several thousands pounds cheaper. In the last few days of all-night laundry sessions my dehumidifier has been my sole and trusty companion and I love it dearly.

So there you are. If you are considering a dehumidifier for any reason, get one - and get this one.

That’s all. I have nothing more profound to say than that. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Is it me for the norovirus high-jump next? And when?