MeacoDry Arete Two 20L Review

Verdict

MeacoDry’s Arete Two offers the same design and features as the first generation of Arete dehumidifiers, but with a few useful upgrades including smart controls, and a more informative screen.

Most importantly, it’s still an extremely good dehumidifier. The MeacoDry Arete Two 20L reviewed here should be effective enough to help keep condensation and mould at bay in a family home, but it’s neither huge nor offensively loud. It’s a great choice if you want a dehumidifier you can actually live with.

Introduction

The MeacoDry Arete series of dehumidifiers combines a smart design with effective and quiet dehumidification. I loved the first-generation models, but now there’s a new crop, with big upgrades including smart controls and a new screen. I’m testing the MeacoDry Arete Two 20L, which is aimed at four and five-bedroom homes, but as before there are also 10L and 12L devices, along with a range-topping 25L model.

These numbers refer to the amount of water (in litres) each model can, in ideal circumstances, remove from the air over 24 hours.

Look at the more detailed performance figures and there’s not much difference between the Arete Two 20L and the Arete One 20L, so the real question is whether MeacoDry has managed to improve the second-generation model in other ways.

Design and Features

• Unobtrusive and practical design
• Useful controls and humidistat
• Smart controls need more depth

Sensibly, MeacoDry has left the original Arete design pretty much alone. The MeacoDry Arete Two 20L still looks modern, and is a little smaller than you might expect for a reasonably powerful dehumidifier.

It comes on casters, and has a retractable handle that helps you lug it around the home – at 15kg with an empty water tank, it’s not something you’ll want to lift up and downstairs too often.

The clever Arete design lets you push this dehumidifier right back against a wall, so it’s fairly easy to find a home for it. It comes with a generous two-metre cable, and there’s a hook to let you wind up any excess.

At the rear, you’ll find a removable, washable dust filter as standard, but there’s also a HEPA 13 filter in the box. Fitting it turns the Arete Two 20L into an air purifier, although it does slightly reduce the air throughput, and potentially the maximum dehumidification available.

At the front there’s a removable 4.8-litre water tank with a built-in handle, and a float which tells the dehumidifier when it’s full. There’s also a concealed nozzle suitable for connecting a standard hose length. This is ideal if you’re leaving the humidifier unattended, but water will only flow downhill to a sink or drain. Unlike smaller Arete Two models, you can’t mount the 20L or 25L to a wall to help with this.

It’s on the top panel that you’ll notice most of the upgrades over the older model. The MeacoDry Arete Two 20L replaces the previous screen-and-buttons combination with a wide mono touchscreen, showing the humidity level with a more intuitive bar chart. It looks great, even though it’s not much of a practical improvement over the earlier controls. At the front there’s a new two-position louvre above the air outlet, which offers more control over the airflow direction than on the Arete One.

The MeacoDry Arete Two 20L is designed to be simple to use. In its default ‘Smart Humidity’ mode you simply set your desired percentage for relative humidity, and the dehumidifier will do all the work to maintain it. This defaults to 55%, which is ideal, but you can go all the way down to 40%, or even configure the dehumidifier to work constantly. You can also save power by relaxing the setting up to 70%, although that’s higher than ideal if you’re trying to avoid condensation and mould.

There’s a night mode, which silences beeps, turns off the screen and limits the fan to its lowest speed. If you’ve fitted the HEPA 13 filter you might want to use Air Purifying mode, which runs the fan only. The final mode, Smart Laundry, is for drying damp clothes. It runs for six hours with a target humidity of just 35%.

You can select all these features and more from the control panel, or you could install and connect to Meaco’s new app. This offers all the same controls and indicators as the dehumidifier itself, including a child lock, and on and off timers for up to 24 hours.

The app’s easy to use, but unfortunately, it doesn’t offer any significant extra information or features, such as a historical overview of humidity. More significantly there’s no scheduling, so you can’t for example configure the Arete Two 20L to run overnight and switch off every morning.

You can’t use this dehumidifier with Matter or IFTTT, but you can connect it to Alexa or the Google Assistant, which lets you control it by voice. You can also use it to trigger automations – for example, configuring Google Home to start a fan or turn on the heating if the Arete Two detects humidity above a certain level.

Performance

• Effective dehumidification
• Surprisingly quiet
• A little lacking in control

While most pollutants are measured in parts per million, or micrograms per cubic metre, humidity is measured as a percentage. Air’s relative humidity (RH) relates to how much water vapour it can hold: an RH of 100% means the air is fully saturated, whereas air with a healthy RH of around 50% is only half ‘full’ of water. Things are a little more complex because warm air can hold more water – put the heating on and your room becomes less humid, even if you don’t refresh the air.

Humidity is a problem in warm weather, where a high RH slows down the rate at which sweat evaporates, so you overheat. In cold weather, water can condense when warm air encounters cool surfaces like a window or a badly insulated wall, leading to damp or mould problems. Most dehumidifiers lower the humidity by passing room air over a cold refrigerator coil, which causes water to condense. The air then travels over the warm side of the coil, returning it to room temperature.

I tested the MeacoDry Arete Two 20L’s performance in a four-bedroom house, initially by placing it on the upstairs landing. Here, it was powerful enough to quickly lower humidity on the landing to its target 55%, and keep it thereabouts – you can see this recorded by the dotted line between about 9:30 and 18:00 in the chart below, recorded by a nearby Tado thermostat.

While this didn’t directly lower the humidity in the bedrooms that lead from the landing, leaving their doors open allowed humidity to migrate towards the dehumidifier. Quite quickly, other upstairs rooms also showed falling humidity levels.

While it’s great to have a dehumidifier that modulates its activity based on humidity, there’s a coarseness to the way this works in practice. Like the Arete One, the Arete Two keeps working until it measures 3% below the target RH, at which point it shuts off. 30 minutes later it fires up the fan to blow fresh air over the sensor, resuming dehumidification if the RH is 3% or more above the target, and shutting down for another 30 minutes if not. I found that this cycle meant the MeacoDry wouldn’t necessarily leap straight into action when the humidity levels started going up – for example when I was bathing my kids.

As with my own Arete One 12L, the Arete Two’s humidity readings seem to rise well above the true level when the fan’s not running. I’m not sure why Meaco hasn’t taken the opportunity to reposition the sensor, which might improve accuracy and remove the need to run the fan at regular intervals.

This 20L version of the Arete Two is over-specified for drying a single room, but I wanted to see how it performed. I shut it in a roughly 20 square metre bedroom with a starting humidity of 68%, as recorded by a Tado radiator thermostat.

Within half an hour, the dehumidifier had reached its 55% target and cut out, but the Tado thermostat had only recorded a drop to 64%. This fell as low as 62% as the dehumidifier completed multiple cycles, but after four hours the humidifier was mostly remaining off, and the radiator thermostat reading had crept back up to 66%. Still, at least the power use remained low, with the dehumidifier consuming only 0.288 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity over four hours of use – equivalent to around 7p at October 2024 prices.

I wondered if the room could have been dehumidified more quickly and thoroughly if the fan continued running more of the time, encouraging the air to circulate even when the condenser wasn’t running. In practice, I found I generally needed to set a lower target humidity than I wanted to keep the MeacoDry Arete Two 20L constantly active and thus get the fastest performance. However, if you set and forget it, this dehumidifier should still reach, and stabilise at the target level over time.

I repeated my test in the same room with the dehumidifier set into laundry mode, and pointing at a half-load of freshly washed clothes. Over six hours it consumed just over 1.4kWh of electricity, a cost of around 34p. During that time it collected an impressive 1.7 litres of water, leaving my laundry almost dry. That’s less energy than you’d use running a traditional vented tumble drier, but more than I’d expect my heat pump dryer to use for the same load.

The MeacoDry Arete Two 20L contains a compressor that’s pretty similar to the one in my dryer, so I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t louder. From one metre away I measured 45.1dB with the compressor running, and 41.1dB in air purifier mode. For me, that’s a bit too loud to have on in the bedroom, but it didn’t disturb anyone when left running on the landing overnight. It’s worth noting that dehumidifiers do transfer some vibration into the floor, which can reverberate – you’ll get the quietest installation if you put them on thick carpet or concrete.

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