Maintaining proper humidity levels in your Fresno-area home increases indoor health and comfort for you and your family, while lowering energy use, reducing wear and tear on your HVAC system and preventing moisture damage to furniture and other wooden household possessions or fixtures.
4 Tips for Balancing Humidity
Notice the signs: If your home is too humid or too dry, there may be some telltale signs. Check windows and glass surfaces for condensation, look on walls and ceilings for moisture stains, check for mold in kitchens and bathrooms and observe family members with allergies for increased symptoms. If these problems exist, your home may be too humid.
Conversely, signs of too little moisture in your home could be chapped lips and dry skin on family members, increased static electricity and cracking or splitting wood fixtures and furniture. Once you know whether you have too much or too little moisture, take the appropriate action to restore levels to normal.
Check the levels: Usually, a visual or sensory assessment is not enough to determine the humidity levels in your home, other than to tell you it’s really high or really low. For a more accurate assessment, use a hygrometer. This moisture-detecting device responds to the humidity in your home, showing levels in the form of percentages on a readable gauge. To work properly, the device should be left out of sunlight and away from indoor drafts.
Add moisture: An overly dry atmosphere in your home is common in the winter when you’re heating with a forced-air furnace. Try setting out pans of water and employing house plants to add moisture to the air. An effective ventilation system will allow your home to exchange dry and stale indoor air with fresh outside air that’s likely to carry more moisture. For a more aggressive strategy of combatting dry air, use a room humidifier to treat especially dry parts of your home, or a whole-house system for a more pervasive dry air problem throughout your home.
Remove moisture: Try heating the area or rooms of your home that have excess moisture, or clearing air vents to solve the problem. If moisture issues persist, take a more proactive approach and employ a dehumidifier. Again, you can decide between a portable and whole-house model, depending on the scale of the humidity problem in your home and your budget.
If you need more help with balancing humidity in your home, please contact us at Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in the greater Fresno, California area about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about humidity and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock