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- Compact and quiet
- Good performance in smaller rooms
- Surprisingly useful laundry mode
- Limited drying power
- Small water tank
In general, small dehumidifiers don’t tend to be very effective. Sure, nobody wants a hulking, noisy beast standing 70cm high in their living room or bedroom, but with size comes a larger fan, more airflow and a more powerful compressor or larger desiccant disk. That in turn makes it more likely that it’s going to clear a good-sized room of excess moisture. Small dehumidifiers I’ve tested, such as the Russell Hobbs RHDH1101G, have struggled to do so, or even work effectively in smaller rooms.
Luckily, Meaco’s Arete One 6L does a better job. It’s designed specifically to prevent damp, mould and condensation in smaller spaces – think single bedrooms, compact kitchens or rooms in shared housing. It’s also being pitched as a wet washing dryer, with its own six-hour Laundry mode. Its compact size makes it easier to fit in cramped conditions, yet it should have enough power to make a difference and stop moisture building up. I’ve spent the last two weeks testing it to see whether it does.
What do you get for the money?
The Arete One 6L is a super-compact dehumidifier, standing just 395mm tall with a 288 x 214mm footprint. It weighs a mere 7.9Kg, making it incredibly easy to move around the house using its integrated carrying handle.
Its pint-sized proportions are perfect for small bedrooms, box rooms, home offices and tiny city kitchens, but they also come with two downsides. Firstly, there’s the extraction rate. Where Meaco’s Arete Two 12L is specified to extract up to 5.4l per day at 20°C and 60% relative humidity or 8.51l per day at 20°C and 80% relative humidity, the Arete One 6L can only extract 2.63l and 4.71l per day under the same conditions. Secondly, its smaller 1.8l tank means you’ll need to empty it a little more often when it’s working hard.
In design, it’s effectively a shrunk-down version of the Arete One, which Meaco continues to sell alongside its newer Arete Two dehumidifier. The matte white plastic body is much the same, with the mushroom-coloured top panel sloping down into a vent at the front. The four membrane buttons sit either side of a digital display that shows the current humidity level, or the target humidity when you’re changing settings. The water tank slides in and out of the front of the unit and, once removed, can easily be emptied through two outlets at the rear. It’s a really simple and straightforward dehumidifier, which is a big part of its appeal.
What features does it have?
The Arete One 6L has two core modes – a Smart Humidity mode and a Smart Laundry mode – which you can engage using the two biggest buttons on the control panel. By default, the smart humidity mode targets a relative humidity of 55%, but if you want to go lower or higher you can toggle through the options by pressing repeatedly on the dehumidifier button. The laundry mode is even more straightforward. Press the laundry button and the Arete One 6L will keep working away at full steam until the humidity level hits 32% or its six-hour timer runs down. Pressing the button again just shows you how much time you have left to go.
Beyond this, there is a Night mode, which reduces the fan speed to low and turns off the display and any button beeps, and an Air Purification mode, which cuts out the compressor but runs the fan continuously to filter the air through the replaceable HEPA filter provided.
How well does it work?
It’s no surprise that the Arete One 6L can’t match the performance of larger dehumidifiers when it’s working in a bigger space. Working in my living room at a temperature of 20°C, it managed to pull the relative humidity down from 70% to 66% in an hour, but could only hit 65% in a second hour. That’s still better than the Russell Hobbs, which could only drop the humidity down by 3% in total, but not a fantastic effort by any other standard.
However, that’s not really what the Arete One 6L was designed for. Working in the small back bedroom where I test compact dehumidifiers, it took the humidity down from 73% to 69% in 60 minutes and to 65% in two hours. What’s more, it kept working hard after that, hitting 63% after three hours and 59% after five. It’s not a speedy dehumidifier, especially in comparison to larger models, but it’s got what it takes to deal with excess moisture in a relatively small space.
Just as importantly, it’s quiet and energy efficient while it’s doing so. Even in Laundry mode, the sound output stayed under 39dBA, maxing out at 38.8dBA. In the Smart Humidity mode, sound levels ran from 34dBA to 37.6dBA. I wouldn’t say you could necessarily sleep through it, but the sound is unobtrusive – more a low hum with a subtle throb than anything that might disturb you. When it was simply maintaining rather than reducing the humidity level, I barely noticed that it was on.
To be perfectly honest, I had my doubts about the Arete One 6L’s Smart Laundry mode. Could this diminutive dehumidifier dry a rack full of clothes in just six hours? Surprisingly, yes. Thick sweatshirts and a pair of jeans weren’t perfectly dry, but they were dry enough that an hour on a rack next to a radiator removed the last slightly damp patches. T-shirts, socks, vests, jumpers and thermal tops were all dry enough to be put away. Not a bad effort for something this small, and another thing that might endear the Arete One 6L to students and house-sharers.
As a bonus, the Arete One 6L can fit in spaces where you wouldn’t normally fit a dehumidifier. At one point during testing, I had to thoroughly clean and deoderise a space under the stairs that an ageing cat had mistaken for her litter tray. This wasn’t a pleasant job, but at least I could rely on the dehumidifier to help it dry out quickly.
What could be improved?
Not much. I’d love the Arete One 6L to have a little more drying power and do its stuff a little faster, but we’re up against the laws of physics here, and there’s a balance with this machine between size, noise and performance. You can’t keep the first too low and expect the third to be super-high. I also found the water tank needed emptying straight after a laundry cycle ended, but that’s fair enough given it’s been working hard over a six hour period. Meaco has designed this dehumidifier for a specific niche in the market, and it fills that niche extremely well.
Should you buy the Meaco Arete One 6L?
As long as you’re only looking to deal with a small space, then yes. The Arete One 6L is more effective than other compact dehumidifiers I’ve tested, and it’s quiet, easy to use and should fit into the smallest room. It’s also pretty good at drying laundry – especially the thinner, lighter stuff. Head for the bigger Arete models if you need something with more power for larger rooms, but the Arete One 6L will do the job on a smaller scale.
