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Kansas City is well known for its humid, muggy summers. Humidity, unfortunately, is not limited to the outdoors and can quickly compromise the comfort of your home’s interior. Indoor humidity also negatively affects your air conditioning’s efficiency and often leads to increased energy usage. Investing in a whole-home dehumidification will improve your comfort and could save you money.
How Dehumidification Improves Home Comfort
Hot, muggy weather can make you feel sweaty and miserably uncomfortable. Dealing with heat and humidity outside is one thing, but it’s even worse when your home is also extremely humid: You have no place to escape. You’ll never feel as comfortable when the air inside your home is overly humid as you would if the air was drier. This is true even if your air conditioning always keeps your home at your preferred temperature.
The fact that humidity affects how you sense temperature is why weather reports often list the actual temperature and the “feels-like” temperature. Let’s say that the temperature in your home is 75 degrees. If the humidity level was at 0%, the temperature would feel like it was around 70 degrees. If the humidity level was at 80%, your house would feel warmer due to the higher moisture content in the air.
Humid air negatively affects your comfort level because it interferes with your body’s capacity to cool itself. Humans sweat to cool down and keep our body temperature from being too high. The sweat then evaporates, which produces a cooling effect that lowers body temperature and makes you feel less hot. The problem is that high humidity makes the sweat evaporate much more slowly since the air is already saturated and can’t hold as much moisture. That means you’ll quickly feel much hotter since your body won’t be able to cool itself properly, resulting in your body temperature increasing. In extreme cases, you could even develop heat stroke if the sweat can’t evaporate fast enough.
This is why you’ll feel hotter and more uncomfortable if your home is humid even if your air conditioning keeps your house sufficiently cool. Air conditioning helps with humidity since some of the moisture in the air condenses when the air hits the AC evaporator coil. This effect is usually enough to control indoor humidity in drier climates. However, it is rarely sufficient on its own in Kansas City and other places that experience extreme humidity during the summer. That’s why so many homes in our area require dehumidification to ensure the air is drier and everyone inside feels cooler and more comfortable. By actively working to remove moisture and dry the air in your home, your sweat will evaporate more quickly, and you won’t feel nearly as hot.
The Effect Humidity Has on AC Efficiency and Indoor Air Quality
Air conditioning works to capture and remove both latent heat and sensible heat from the air inside a building. Removing sensible heat means taking heat energy out of the air to decrease its temperature. Removing latent heat is different since it involves taking heat out of any substance so that it changes states, such as from a gas to a liquid. Removing latent heat from a substance doesn’t lower its temperature but instead works to change the substance from a gas to a liquid or a liquid to a solid.
Water is much better at retaining heat compared to air. That means for an AC system to cool the air, it first needs to remove latent heat from the water vapor in the air so that it condenses into liquid water. Once much of the latent heat has been removed, the AC can start removing sensible heat and decreasing the temperature of the air. When the air is humid, your AC will cool more slowly and work less effectively since it has to first remove so much latent heat before it can finally start capturing the sensible heat and cooling the air. That’s why you’ll always experience issues with your air conditioning running longer whenever the humidity level in your home is higher. The longer running times are also why your AC will always use more energy when humidity levels are higher.
Another issue is that more moisture condenses on the evaporator coil in humid conditions. Although the water continually drips off the coil, the moisture still creates a barrier preventing the refrigerant from pulling in as much heat. That’s yet another reason air conditioning doesn’t work as well or cool as quickly when the interior of a home is quite humid. This is a benefit of dehumidification since it will allow your air conditioning to work more effectively so that your electricity bills aren’t as high.
Another issue that can happen if your home is constantly humid is that condensation can start forming on walls, ceilings, and other surfaces. This condensation is why mold issues are much more common in humid climates. If mold starts growing in your home, it can quickly spread to other areas in as little as one to two days. Mold spores will begin circulating in your house and will decrease indoor air quality.
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Why a Whole-Home Dehumidifier is the Best Dehumidification Option
Portable dehumidifiers generally aren’t an effective option for managing indoor humidity throughout a house. That’s because their fans are only powerful enough to pull air in from the immediate surrounding area. A large portable humidifier could be sufficient for drying the air in a smaller space like a bedroom. However, you’d usually need to have multiple units running at the same time to effectively dehumidify larger or more open spaces like your living room, kitchen, etc. Another thing is that you need to empty the water reservoir fairly often. If not, the dehumidifier will shut off every time the reservoir fills, which could be several times a day.
Installing a whole-home dehumidifier is the only effective option for controlling the humidity level throughout every part of a house. Part of the reason that this type of unit works so well is that it can be connected to your HVAC ductwork. That means it will continually remove moisture from the air coming into your AC system so that the air the system puts out into every room is drier. Another advantage is that you can run a pipe from the dehumidifier to a floor drain or connect it to your air conditioning’s condensate drain system. That means the water will always drain away, and you will never have to empty a reservoir.
Most whole-home dehumidifiers come with a humidistat that works to measure indoor humidity. The humidistat allows you to program your desired humidity level so that the dehumidifier doesn’t run more than needed. It also ensures that your home’s air won’t end up getting too dry. The dehumidifier will usually start running when your AC turns on, but only if the humidistat detects that your home is more humid than you want it to be.
Depending on the size, a whole-home dehumidifier typically uses between 600 and 1,000 watts of electricity per hour. Most portable units, on the other hand, use around 250-300 watts per hour. That means you’d usually end up paying more in electricity costs to run multiple portable units than you would a single whole-home dehumidifier.
Contact MVP Air Conditioning, Heating, Plumbing & Electric
If you need any home comfort services in the Greater Kansas area, MVP Air Conditioning, Heating, Plumbing & Electric is ready to help. We offer expert air conditioning and heating services, and we can also handle your dehumidification, indoor air quality, plumbing, and electrical needs. For more information on the benefits of whole-home dehumidification, contact us today.
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