seatsniffer

It depends on where you are. In the US it's like you say. But in the UK for example they will often use data as singular.

I'm more used to working with larger scale industrial equipment where the user/operator can exchange parts and actually change lubricants etc.

As far as home/personal devices the best you can really do is clean out any filters, get rid of dust etc and listen for when the motor inevitably fails or starts to fail at some point.

I'll preface this saying that I'm not an expert on dehumidifiers and don't work one them, but I do have a background in hardware electrical design and thermal engineering.

There are different types of dehumidifiers, typically you'd use a refrigerant based system. Without proper ventilation the compressor can overheat, the refrigerant is also typically flammable, lubricants also. Design flaws and not maintaining the system can cause reliability issues. If a device has been designed by a competent team, there should be a thermal cutoff ie when the motor gets too hot it will shut down. A badly designed system may not have this at all, or the thermal sensor might be somewhere stupid meaning the measured temperature isn't the one that matters, its also possible the cut off is too high. It's also possible a crap compressor/motor is being used and driven too hard for the use case.

Bad wiring is also possiblly an issue.

With a peltier system. They use a lot of power. Components can get really hot such as the power electronics used to drive the peltier cooler.

Another poster mentioned water and electronics together with poor design can cause fire risks. This is absolutely true.

Without actually having these failed devices I can't really give much more insight than that. But I hope it gave anyone a basic idea.

Thanks for taking the time to explain. I'll check out the link also.

That's something I hadn't heard about. Is there any particular reason for this?

Couldn't companies just adopt strategies that have been used for "traditional" engineers for decades? Verify credentials and then for technical interviews discuss a potential proplem that could easily arise in detail and how you'd solve it.