Humidity has a much bigger effect on comfort than you may think. Dry indoor air and high indoor humidity can both be issues in Arizona during different times of the year and result in your house not feeling as comfortable as you’d like it to be. Luckily, there are some effective options for maintaining the proper humidity level in your home and ensuring it’s always fully comfortable.
What Is the Ideal Indoor Humidity Level?
Different people have their personal preferences when it comes to humidity and may feel more comfortable when the air in their house is a bit more or less dry. Nonetheless, the majority of people feel most comfortable indoors when the relative humidity level is between 40% and 50%.
Having the humidity level in the home be a bit lower isn’t much of an issue, but overly dry air often leads to issues like dry or runny eyes, itchy skin, a sore throat, sinus irritation, and respiratory issues. If the air in your home is extremely dry much of the time, you may eventually encounter issues with wood furniture warping and cracking. Overly dry air can also sap moisture out of leather and lead to cracking.
High indoor humidity is a much bigger cause for concern. One reason is that air conditioning doesn’t work as effectively in overly humid conditions. Air conditioning works by removing both sensible heat and latent heat from the air. Sensible heat is the heat you feel. Latent heat is the heat that needs to be added or removed for a substance to change states, i.e., transform from a gas into a liquid.
Hot, humid air contains a large amount of latent heat, and an AC system must first remove much of the latent heat by causing the moisture to condense on the system’s evaporator coil before it can start effectively removing sensible heat from the air. The result is that the AC system can’t cool the air flowing through it as much when the humidity level is much higher, leading to the system using more energy.
Another issue is just that high relative humidity makes you feel hotter by preventing sweat from evaporating off your skin as quickly. This often leads people to set their thermostats to a lower temperature to cool off, further contributing to increased energy costs.
The other concern when a house is too humid is that it can lead to condensation forming on certain surfaces. The condensation combined with heat can then quickly lead to mold growth inside the house and contribute to a major decrease in indoor air quality. This last issue is why you want to try and keep the humidity level in your house under 55 to 60%.
How to Combat Issues With Low Indoor Humidity
Many homes in Arizona struggle with extremely low indoor humidity throughout much of the year, and the most effective option for combating this issue is with a whole-home humidifier. Whole-home dehumidifiers are extremely beneficial in the winter months, as running your heating system always results in the relative humidity in the house decreasing.
In other parts of the country, you’d generally never want to run a dehumidifier when your air conditioning is on, as the added moisture would negatively affect AC performance and efficiency. This typically isn’t a problem in our climate as long as you set the humidifier to maintain the relative humidity level at around 30-40%. The humidifier will still lead to your energy bills being higher, but it can be worth the price for the fact that it will help make your home more comfortable.
You can install one of three different types of whole-home humidifiers in a central HVAC system: steam humidifiers, fan-powered humidifiers and bypass humidifiers. Fan-powered and bypass units rely on the heat the HVAC system produces to cause the moisture they contain to evaporate, meaning they will only work when you have your heating system on.
Steam humidifiers use electricity to boil water and produce steam, meaning you can use this type of unit any time of the year. Be aware that steam humidifiers cost quite a bit more and can use substantial amounts of electricity. That means you may be better off with a fan-powered or bypass unit if you’re mostly only concerned about dry indoor air during winter.
Some other easy options can help you combat dry air during the summer. For instance, having many plants in your house will always help keep the air a bit more humid. Hanging out your laundry on drying racks inside is another easy way to raise the humidity level in your home.
Whether the exterior of your house is properly sealed and airtight also makes a major difference in how dry it gets during the summer. A well-sealed house traps moisture inside whereas a leaky house allows a large amount of hot, dry air to flow in from outside. This is why it’s important to check for air leaks and try to seal up any gaps and cracks in your home’s exterior and around windows and exterior doors.
How to Keep Your House from Being Too Humid
For most of the year, high indoor humidity isn’t something you need to worry about in Arizona due to how dry our climate typically is. However, you might struggle to keep your house from being too humid and feeling overly muggy during the monsoon season. One thing that always helps during this time is just leaving your windows closed at night and your AC on so that the AC continually removes moisture from the air whenever it runs. It’s also important to make use of the exhaust fans in your kitchen and bathroom when cooking and bathing to draw all of the moisture and steam outside.
If you find that your home is always too humid during monsoon season, no matter what you do, consider adding a whole-home dehumidifier to your HVAC system. The dehumidifier will typically run whenever your air conditioning does and remove far more moisture than your AC does. You can also program it to run only when the humidity level is above a certain percentage. Using portable dehumidifiers is another option, but you’d need one running in every room to keep the entire house sufficiently dry. In this case, your energy bills would increase by quite a bit more than they would with a whole-home dehumidifier. Another great thing about a whole-home dehumidifier is that it connects to the house’s drain system, meaning you don’t need to empty the water reservoir as you do with portable units.
Ready for Top-Level Indoor Home Comfort? Contact Us!
For more than 20 years, El Indio AC has been providing expert indoor comfort services to homeowners in Tolleson and the West Valley. As the area’s leading indoor air quality service, we have solutions to help you effectively manage all of your IAQ and humidity control needs, including humidifiers, dehumidifiers, air purifiers, and more. We also offer professional indoor air quality testing and can help you identify any areas of concern in your home.
To get advice on how to best manage humidity issues in your home and schedule routine AC maintenance, contact us today.
