Humidity Levels-6 Tips To Keep Ideal Levels for Your Household
Home is a place to relax comfortably and enjoy your time with family and friends. However, conditions like extreme humidity levels may deny you the rest you desperately need. High and low humidity can cause dry skin, susceptibility to coldness, drying of the walls, mold infestation, allergies, and many more negative effects.
Perhaps it has never hit you that some of the devastating symptoms you and your family experience now and then stem from unregulated humidity levels in your home. But now you know better. Thus, it’s wise to look into your house’s humidity levels. Below are tips on keeping it at ideal levels, whether it’s summer or winter:
Purchase A Dehumidifier
A dehumidifier is a device that decreases and maintains a comfortable level of humidity in the air at your home. Fundamentally, a fan collects the indoor air and pulls it into the dehumidifier. While in there, the air comes into contact with cold coils, and moisture in it condenses. The moisture-free air is then warmed up and finally recirculated into the room.
It’s a valuable household appliance. Below are some of its benefits:
- It enhances your comfort inside the house, especially during the summer when humidity levels get to notoriously high levels.
- It helps prevent some health issues, such as allergies.
- For asthmatic people, it may help improve their breathing.
- Reducing indoor humidity may help eliminate pests that need moisture to survive. Examples include roaches, centipedes, bugs, silverfish, and earwigs.
- It’s an excellent way to fight mold infestation since mold thrives on damp surfaces. Ultimately, your walls and furniture will retain their original color and luster.
So, you’d want to shop for the right dehumidifier whose capacity matches your room size. Sites like https://humidityfixers.com/ and similar ones stock a huge range of premium quality humidifiers from trusted and renowned brands. They also have experienced personnel who can help you with the installation.
Dry Laundry Outdoors
Having wet laundry hanging in the house isn’t advisable, especially during a hot day, considering the moisture that may emanate from them. Therefore, you’d want to dry them outside and save your house from unnecessary dampness.
Aside from reducing indoor humidity, line drying is an excellent approach to saving the energy bills you’d have incurred if you used a clothes dryer. Additionally, sunlight is a natural bleaching and sanitizing agent, meaning your clothes will stay in a better condition than machine-dried ones. To this end, install a simple clothesline by fixing a nylon rope between two wooden posts. Ensure it’s in an open area and not heavily shaded by trees. You can also opt for ready-to-use clothes-drying racks, which you can freely move to where the sun shines at any given time.
Grow Indoor Plants
Some indoor plants can help lower the humidity levels. These include English Ivy, Parlor Palm, Boston fern, orchid, spider plant, air plant, cactus, and peace lily. Their leaves have stomata that absorb water vapor, which travels to the roots of the plants. The result is a low humid environment within your home. The good thing with most of these plants is that they need little sunlight to flourish, so they are perfect for the indoors. Some of them, like the spider plant, are also known to rid the indoor air of harmful pollutants.
In addition to reducing humidity, green plants improve your interior’s aesthetic appeal, especially if planted creatively. Your home’s value will also increase, and visitors are bound to appreciate your sense of style.
Install Exhaust Fans
The bathroom and kitchen are well-known culprits for high humidity levels in the house. Cooking releases volumes of water vapor, and the same applies to hot water showering. If not directed to the outside, the released moisture can spread to the other rooms and raise the humidity levels.
Thus, you’d want to install exhaust fans in your bathrooms and kitchen or in any other room housing appliances that release water vapor. These mechanical ventilation devices replace the humid air with fresher zero-moisture air from the outside.
Replace Air Conditioners
Every appliance is bound to stop working efficiently at some point in time. Perhaps you’ve used your air conditioner (AC) for years, and it’s no longer efficient in regulating the humidity levels. At this point, it’s only wise to replace it with a new one instead of stretching it beyond its design limits. In the same sense, ensure your AC’s capacity matches your room size. Using a small one in a big room will only overwork it without achieving the desired temperature and humidity levels.
Fix Humidity Sensors
In your attempt to restore appropriate humidity levels in your home, it’s paramount to have a means of accurately measuring the amount of moisture in the indoor air. It is usually done using humidity sensors. A good one should indicate the current moisture levels, enabling you to take the appropriate corrective measures. But if it’s not reading the humidity levels correctly, you might not know when to act.
It doesn’t only apply to stand-alone humidity sensors but also the ones integrated into appliances like dehumidifiers. So, call a professional to check the condition of your humidity sensors. They’ll advise you on whether to keep them as they are, fix them, or replace them with new ones.
Conclusion
As a homeowner, comfort within the house is paramount. One aspect of the indoor air you must be concerned about is the humidity level. If it’s too low or too high, you may suffer several health issues as outlined above. Also, your house may get damaged through mold growth and structural failure of wooden elements.
To reduce the humidity levels, you can consider installing a dehumidifier, drying clothes outdoors, growing indoor plants, installing exhaust fans, replacing air conditioners, and fixing humidity sensors. While you can do most of these things on your own, it pays to ask for professional help with the more technical tasks. Ultimately, your home will have a conducive environment and offer the relaxing atmosphere you have always longed for.
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