The Meaco DD8L Zambezi dehumidifier is unlike any other dehumidifier in the world and sets new standards for the dehumidifier industry to work to and to try and match. The machine is truly unique, below is the story of how it was born.
Although dehumidifiers play a very important role in improving the air quality in your home and in turn they can make a big difference to your families quality of life they are not the most exciting product in the world! I was thinking about this whilst I was at a trade show in Berlin during September 2014 and decided that we should associate the desiccant dehumidifier that we were busy developing with an animal to make it more interesting and to add some personality to the machine. I went through all sorts of animals, penguins, polar bears, whales, dolphins etc. but settled on an elephant because I liked the image of the elephant next to a watering hole in the wild and the idea of the level of water being vital to the elephant’s survival. This image mirrored with the level of water in the dehumidifier going up or down depending on whether it was collecting water or not.
Once I had decided on the elephant we knew that we had to give something back to help conserve the elephant in the wild, there was no way as a company that we could make money out of an animal without contributing to its conservation.
Back in the 1990’s we shared a building with the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation (DSWF) at Smithbrook Kilns in Cranleigh, they were upstairs and we had the ground floor, as well as this our oldest daughter was best friends with one of the daughters of the then finance officer from the Foundation and had helped out at some of their fundraising activities over the years. Add to the mix that the DSWF supports an Elephant Orphanage in Zambia and it became a ‘no-brainer’ that we should support their work.
So we approached the foundation and luckily they remembered us and the personal link helped as well. The next step was to add the elephant to the dehumidifier to give the machine some character and the foundation were very helpful. They suggested a young elephant called Zambezi that has a distinctive mohican and had a very cheeky personality. One of their supporters is wildlife artist Jonathan Truss who is a previous winner of the BBC Wildlife Artist of the Year Award and he drew some excellent caricatures of Zambezi for us to use on the dehumidifier.
He drew two versions, one was is a happy Zambezi that displays when the dehumidifier is collecting water and a sad Zambezi when it has nothing to do. These can be seen on the dehumidifier’s display when the machine is turned on.
That was beginning, we now have a dehumidifier with personality and one that supports some excellent conservation work in the wild. For every DD8L Zambezi that we sell anywhere in the world, £2 is donated to the charity to support their work.
The DD8L Zambezi is not just about the charity link up though, it has several unique features never seen anywhere else in the world which we will document in this blog going forward.
Products featured: Meaco DD8L Zambezi
