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Humidity refers to the water content in the ambient air. High humidity makes you sweaty and uncomfortable, your hands clammy and has a damaging effect on your home. If humidity levels inside your home are high you will begin to see damp spots and mold growth leading to respiratory issues, allergy flare-ups, and structural damage to your home.
The perfect humidity level is at 30-50% which keeps you and your home comfortable.
Here are some tips to reduce humidity indoors and maintain it at comfortable levels.
- Ventilate your Home
Areas like the kitchen and bathrooms should be well ventilated. Ensure sufficient ventilation by using vents or exhausts and keeping windows and doors open as long as possible. Attics and crawl spaces are often neglected when it comes to ventilation, but if not take care of, they can become a hotbed of humidity. Use attic fans and vents to keep them ventilated and dry.
- Fans
Using fans throughout the house can help with the airflow and reduce humidity. Fans increase the airflow and move warm stale air around in the room, thereby, removing excess moisture through evaporation. Plus, fans are great at providing relief from sweating. Fans also work great for when you only need to monitor a small area for humidity levels.
- Replace AC/Furnace filters.
Air conditioning is great at reducing humidity but is only as effective as the AC filters. Clogged and dirty filters are inefficient, increase your electricity bills, and will not reduce the humidity. Therefore, cleaning them will help to reduce the amount of humidity in your home. Vented furnaces also have a similar effect, so make sure to clean those out as well.
- Take short, cold showers
Long hot showers mean excess steam that leads to high humidity indoors. You can either open a window or use an exhaust fan to help reduce the excess moisture. You can start taking colder showers if you can. Apart from being great for your health, you will see less steam being produced leading to lesser humidity.
- Do laundry and hang them outdoors
Laundry is a surprising source of excess humidity indoors. Hanging wet clothes indoors, especially if ventilation is absent or bad, will lead to an increase in indoor humidity levels. We recommend hanging clothes on an outside clothesline. This will prevent your damp garments from increasing humidity levels and prevent it from affecting your home.
- Get a Dehumidifier
A dehumidifier is the surest way to reduce indoor humidity. Dehumidifiers can be fitted inside the furnace air handler. Here they remove almost all the moisture from the air and deliver dry and cool air indoors. If the humidity levels inside your home is above 65%, we recommend getting a dehumidifier. You will also end up using the air conditioner a lot less and save big on your energy bills.
Although mostly an invisible phenomenon, indoor humidity can have long-lasting detrimental effects on both your physical health and the structural health of your house. By following some of the tips you can effectively manage, control, and reduce indoor humidity.
