I've been fighting high humidity here in the south since spring began, went from a small dehumidifier to a larger one and now saving up for an even bigger one since I can't get the lung room below 70 percent on a dry day and if it rains forget it-and it's only going to get worse. Yes, it's an old house and the grow tent is in the coolest room with the biggest dehumidifier.
So I'm dumping out a gallon and a half of water every day after work and most days the dehumidifier has auto shut off before I get home, got the hose setup now so it's much easier but I'm looking at all this water getting dumped out and I know it's specs are pretty close to distilled and I'm thinking how horrible our well water is that I've got to run it through multiple filters and still pH it down just to water the plants with it and here I am throwing water away that's much better than what's coming out of the faucet. Yes, we've looked at RO systems but they're not for us, the waste water it makes wouldn't make sense on our well system that has run dry on us a couple of times.
We had already considered saving the dehumidifier water for the plants. Talked about saving it in 5 gallon water jugs with caps since we have a lot of those, or draining it into 5 gallon buckets, but that amount per day would quickly overflow. So we're running a drip system from a submersible pump on a timer in a 5 gallon bucket and I'm thinking couldn't we rig the dehumidifier straight into that or upgrade to one of those heavy duty plastic totes? It would need some kind of trigger to turn on a pump to keep the water from overflowing and we can run the overflow hose out where we have the dehumidifier hose now. I'm seeing various condensate pumps, sump pumps, and floats for sale but while I get the idea I'm not 100% sure how they work but it seems like some of them are made to remove all of the water, some aren't strong enough to push the 5-6 feet out to drain, so I'm like lemme run this across people who might have done this before. And I've been reading the good for watering opinions and not good for watering opinions all day so we're past that please.