Frigidaire Dehumidifier - FDL50S1 Review

We bought the Frigidaire FDL50S1 Dehumidifier in an emergency situation. The massive amounts of rain that we got this year in Chicago caused our basement to flood. We had put drain tiles into the basement the year before, but water flowed over them into our only carpeted room. It was a lot of rain (12 inches in two days), our sump pump was running for about 5 days straight after the rain stopped! We thankfully already had a wet vac, so we were able to suck up a good bit of the water, but the carpet was still really wet.
After two days, the basement started to take on that moldy, damp smell. I searched online and saw that Lowe's had a 50-pint dehumidifier in stock (http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&productId=288372-70213-FDL50S1&lpage=none).
The unit performs admirably. It sucks the water out of the air at a pretty quick rate. I found I was changing the basin about 2-3 times per day. After about four days our basement was dry. I didn't really want to be changing out the collection basin though. I purchased a garden hose and attached it to the external drainage port. This didn't really work all that well. The water kept leaking out of the connector on the hose; I wasn't able to make a really good seal. I finally got the seal to hold but the hose must have been too long because the water just backed inside the machine rather than go out the hose.
The really good thing about the design of the unit is that each of these failures (the leak and the backup) resulted in the water just going into the basin rather than spilling out of the unit.
I finally was able to hook up a hose that doesn't leak; I ended up using a washing machine hose instead of a garden hose. The kind I got is about 3' in lenght and has a rubber end that you simply push over the external drain port; it fits snugly over the port (I had to trim it a little). I now leave the unit on all of the time in the basement. You can set a humidity level for the room and the unit will maintain that level automatically. Something else of note, the unit also heats the room.