That's true, but I was under the impression that most of the heat generated by current compressor dehumidifiers is just waste heat from the mechanical operation of the compressor itself. The phase change heat is there too, but it's significantly less. So there should still be a lot of room for improvement, theoretically.
Yeah, there's certainly some of that, but going off of Alec's numbers and trial above you end up with a larger portion coming from the latent heat than from the mechanism, for the same reason that a heat pump is more efficient than an electric heater: it's condensing more water than it is running mechanisms.
That said, his demo is not under typical operating conditions in that a dehumidifier is normally expected to actually be able to catch up and reduce humidity in the room, while his demo ensures that the humidity levels stay high throughout the hour. So it's likely that under normal operating conditions the mechanism's proportion of the waste heat is higher than it is in his demo.
> That's true, but I was under the impression that most of the heat generated by current compressor dehumidifiers is just waste heat from the mechanical operation of the compressor itself.
Nope. It's almost all (>80%) latent heat. I believe, the theoretical limit is around 90% for typical room temperatures.