humidity issue, suggestions please!

[saf]

I am trying to fix the humidity in my basement. I just had a tech come out to do the yearly maintenance on our furnace. I was asking what he recommends and all he wanted to do was get me to spend thousands of dollars on various efforts and it didn't seem like he had much experience dealing with this issue.

He was concerned because there was some rust from when my tank flooded part of the basement and that the humidistat that he just put in 10 months ago had a rusted circuit board.

I had a couple of ideas that i was thinking of doing (I attached a diagram of my basement area):

Run a return to the tank room
Run a supply to the tank room
Run an inline fan into the gas vent ductwork (not sure if this is a good idea)
Run an inline fan from the fish room to outside (have to drill through concrete and not sure how to do that correctly.)

water heater and furnance both pull air from inside the house and vent the gas out of the roof.

I know to be careful about creating negative pressure from pulling too much air out of the house. I have an old 1960's house.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! My wife keeps saying to get rid of the tank

 

[FuzzyZipperbaum]

my vote goes to inline fan through concrete wall. Easy to drill through concrete with the right tools. You can also hook the fan up to a humastat and have it set to come on when humidity hits a certain level.

I use minisplits which is more expensive but I need the temperature contoll anyway.