How does humidity affect the comfort in your home? Better question, what is humidity in the home?
This is a question that we get asked and it is a common misconception with homeowners as well. Humidity is simply the amount of water or moisture in the air. Humidity greatly affects the comfort you feel in your home. An illustration is the difference people experience living in Colorado (generally low humidity) vs living in Houston (genereally high humidity).
Controlling the humidity in your home is one of the main keys to comfort! We are good at addressing this issue for your specific situation. If your humidity is above 60% in your home, you likely feel sticky and uncomfortable. Also, higher humidity levels allow the growth of indoor allergens which can seriously affect your health. If your humidity is below 30%, your air is too dry and you will again feel uncomfortable. Too little humidity can cause other issues including dry skin and irritation.
So, you may be asking, how do I know if my humidity levels are correct or not?
Well, there are a couple of ways. One way is to monitor how your feel inside your house vs outside your house. If you generally wake up each day with a runny or stopped up nose and allergies, then you may have an issue. If the problem gets better when you go outside, again you may have an issue. Another way to measure you humidity is with an upgraded thermostat. Many thermostats will read the indoor humidity. This is relatively new for thermostats to show this reading, and we are very excited to have this information so handy. Additionally, Pearson Air can come out and measure the humidity with our hand-held instruments and we can diagnose an issue of too much humidity or too little humidity.
Either way, humidity control is a major issue in homes, especially in Texas. For confirmation of this fact, see this article by The Weather Channel: http://www.weather.com/activities/health/allergies/mold/control_humidity.html
If you have questions about this, please contact us an let us educate you!
Here is a picture of our thermostat here at our Pearson Air thermostat, you can see the humidity in our office is 46% while the outside humidity is 97% (about to rain today)!
