Whats the Best Humidity Level For Your Home, and How Do You Control It? Fire & Ice
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency agrees indoor relative humidity should be below 60% and between 30% and 50% ideally, but achieving this may be tricky. We’ll cover the signs of low and high indoor humidity, why these levels can be dangerous, and how to achieve an ideal indoor relative humidity. You can raise your home’s humidity level through a combination of outdoor and indoor house treatments and living habits. Low humidity causes dry skin, sore throats, and static electricity.
Mold and Mildew Growth
To understand what humidity is, we need to talk about the difference between relative humidity and absolute humidity. Homeowners may have other symptoms, such as feeling cold all the time, having difficulty breathing, and being dehydrated. Ideal indoor humidity depends on a number of factors, including whether you have a condition such as asthma and what month it is. The following table shows the ideal level of humidity to achieve in your home based on specific circumstances.
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Here’s How to Achieve the Ideal Home Humidity Level
However, it will continue to remove moisture through this operation. One of the functions of your air conditioner is to absorb humidity from inside your home and expel it outside. This might help you sleep at night, for example, but won’t do anything about the allergens, dust mites, and mold issues that you might develop if you ignore the rest of your house. If you don’t have access to a hygrometer, there’s a simple DIY test you can perform to gauge the moisture content in the air of your home. Putting containers filled with water near radiators or heating vents can expedite the process of evaporation, releasing moisture into the air. Depending on the season and your geographic location, you may need to use tools like humidifiers or dehumidifiers to achieve this balance.
Remove Standing Water
Both damp and mould can be caused by out-of-kilter humidity levels and if you are wondering how to stop condensation, you should definitely be looking at this as a culprit. Central heating uses forced air to blow warmth to therooms of your house, increasing evaporation and drying the air out quickly.Radiant heat uses the objects of a room to heat a space. Switching to a radiantheat solution could dramatically improve the humidity of a room, even in thedriest of months. Dirty filters in heating and cooling systemscan impede the free flow of air through your home.
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For accurate and reliable readings, position the digital hygrometer away from high moisture areas like the kitchen and bathroom, as well as away from doors and windows. This strategic placement ensures that you get the most precise information about your indoor humidity levels. Plants naturally release moisture through a process called transpiration. Placing a few indoor plants around your home can help increase humidity levels while also enchanting your indoor air quality. Conversely, excessively high indoor humidity levels can result in overheating and the proliferation of mold spores on furniture and surfaces. Most people find a relative humidity level between 30 and 50% is most comfortable.
Spring Home Maintenance Checklist
From excaserbating existing skin and asthmatic conditions to deteriorating wooden upholstery and furniture, indoor air quality plays a huge role in your home comfort. Portable dehumidifiers are also available to remove moisture from individual rooms. While these are typically much less expensive than whole-house dehumidifiers, they don’t draw out nearly as much moisture and require manually emptying the water reservoir. Efficient airflow and water management are the two biggest factors to keep levels in check — and they’re important. Having a green thumb is a great way to add moisture to your home’s air. The average houseplant is quite generous, only retaining about 3% of the moisture it receives while releasing the remaining 97% back into the air.
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This relative humidity in your home should also scale with the outdoor absolute humidity. So now that we’ve talked about comfort levels, you can probably guess what we’ll say next. The ideal humidity level for your home is going to be relative to you and your family.
How Can You Raise Your Home’s Humidity Levels? (4 Tips)
In low humidity environments, your body might feel colder even when you are warm indoor temperature. As the dry air removes moisture from your skin, it will leave you feeling colder, and to deal with this, you will turn up the heat in your home. ” It’s generally understood that poor insulation can allow uncomfortably cold air into a home during the winter, canceling out the efforts of a furnace. When outdoor humidity is high, that damp air can make its way inside via gaps not sealed by insulation. This also means that cool, air-conditioned air can escape instead of circulating indoors.
Or to stop it from spreading when your kids bring it home from school? Want to avoid having to take out a loan just to buy enough skin moisturizer in the winter? Low humidity levels can lead to an increase in static electricity. This not only makes clothes cling uncomfortably but can also damage sensitive electronic equipment. Maintaining a comfortable humidity level in your living space need not be an overwhelming task. Your indoor air quality directly affects your family’s health and also the health of your home.
If your home doesn’t have a furnace, McMurray suggests a Large Capacity Whole House Steam Humidifier. “These can be installed to either discharge directly into a room or to rely on an air handler blower to push the humidified air through the home,” she says. Since it has its own heating element, this model doesn’t need to rely on heat from a furnace or hot water connection.
Maintaining ideal indoor humidity levels is essential for comfort, health, and safety. Your HVAC system plays a crucial role in humidity control, so your professional heating and air conditioning service provider is an excellent resource for help. If you’re unsure, we reviewed the best HVAC companies to help. Just like being too warm or too cold, having a humidity level in your home that’s too high or too low can have an impact on how you feel. It can cause chapped lips, staticky hair and clothes, and even occasional nosebleeds. Humid summer weather, on the other hand, can also create annoyances.
Timothy Dale is a home repair expert and writer with over a decade of hands-on construction and home improvement experience. He is skilled in residential, commercial, industrial and institutional plumbing, electrical, carpentry, installation, renovations, and project management. Feel free to contact us for a free damp assessment or advice from our moisture expert.
In areas of the U.S. where the humidity remains high most of the year, a heating and air conditioning system has to work doubly hard to remove the water from the indoor air. In the southwest climate zone, Arizona has the lowest annual relative humidity of 53% in the morning and 25% in the afternoon. In the south climate zone, Mississippi has the highest recorded relative humidity of 91% in the morning. You might be surprised to learn that higher than average humidity levels in a house could also be causing your heating bills to rise. Forgoing the clothes dryer and hanging uplaundry inside means that all the moisture will evaporate into the air of yourhouse. You’ll also save onenergy costs by reducing your dryer usage while you line dry and improve thehome humidity in winter.
Remember that if your current outdoor relative humidity is higher than the humidity inside your home, operating exhaust fans can work against you by increasing indoor humidity levels. If you live in a muggy or coastal environment, Tip 3 below might be a better option. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the ideal indoor relative humidity is between 30% and 50% — and must be kept below 60%. When the house humidity level rises above 60%, it’s considered high. High indoor humidity levels are common during summer, particularly in regions like the South that experience high outdoor humidity.
However, it’s often hard to do that all year round, which is why a dehumidifier can also come in extremely handy. Something as simple as having a shower or boiling potatoes can cause the humidity levels to rise while opening up windows and turning on air conditioning can cause them to fall. Chris has been advising on humidity solutions and dehumidifiers since 1991 and is well known within the dehumidifier industry across the world as a lead on innovation and sustainability.
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