Fans have been used to ventilate houses for almost 100 years, and they’re an economical way to be sure that the air in your basement, home, or even crawl space is clean and well-circulated.
They are also very simple to install.
Fans are normally fitted inside of vents or windows, which push air from outdoor into your home. This works well and can be added to any wall.
A dehumidifier, on the other hand, has to get its water collection bucket emptied frequently and may need to be connected to a drain so the water can be pumped off.
Fans do not need this kind of routine maintenance or installation.
If the issue in your house is humidity, then a fan may not fix it – or at least, not all of the time. This is because while you may have dried air being pushed inside, the fan does not remove moisture from the atmosphere – but a dehumidifier does. So if you’ve got damp conditions outside, a fan just won’t cut it.
A fan can also get clogged. If it gets clogged with debris, dust, etc., this can cause your fan to get overworked which can burn out the motor.
The worst disadvantage of a fan is that it will cause your condensation issue to become worse if you live in a hot/humid environment and use an AC to cool your residence. If you use a fan to push in warmer air in from outdoors, or perhaps into a crawl space, the air inside your room will be cool due to the AC system.
This means you’ll have hot air from outdoors hitting cooler air inside, which will make your humidity problem even worse.
If you use a dehumidifier, you won’t face this problem.