I’m counting this as a homeschool science project that I didn’t expect to work, but it did. In our area, dehumidifiers are hard to find these days, so a DIY alternative is really our only option. Some quick research suggested calcium chloride could work, but since we don’t have icy roads around here I was skeptical we’d be able to find it.
In fact, we intially could only find iodized table salt. So, we bought about half a kilogram of it, put it into an open container, and left it out overnight.
In the morning, it seemed to have hardened a bit, but the results were far from impressive. We thought it might be helping a little bit, but my quest to find other options intensified.
Eventually, I found a small grocery store that sold iodized sodium chloride rock salt, and I bought two kilograms of it. We put one kilogram in each of two different places in one room, with both locations almost directly under ceiling fans.
