If your throat feels a bit dry or your skin feels itchy and uncomfortable, it may have a lot to do with your indoor air – or what’s missing from it. Efforts to keep your home warm throughout the winter months may also remove much of the water vapor present in your home’s indoor air, effectively drying it out. Heavy use of your furnace can cause your home’s relative humidity to fall well below the 40 to 50 percent threshold needed to maintain a comfortable environment.
Dangers of a Low-Moisture Environment
While too much moisture in your home can be a bad thing, the same goes for having too little moisture in your indoor air. A low-humidity environment not only causes dry and itchy skin, but it can also make you more susceptible to infections, as well as viruses that cause colds and flu.
Woodwork, hardwood flooring and walls can also crack, warp and shrink due to the lack of moisture in the air. The dry air also can cause an increase in static electricity, putting your electronics in danger, as well as giving you a nasty shock now and again.
How to Fix It?
Restoring your home’s humidity levels is simply a matter of adding more moisture to the air. Although everyday activities such as showering and cooking create additional moisture, installing a whole-house humidifier to your heating and cooling system is one of the best ways of managing your home’s relative humidity.
A whole-house humidifier accurately provides balanced indoor relative humidity levels based on outside temperature and indoor, allowing for just the right amount of moisture in the air for improved indoor air quality. These systems require only minimal maintenance and are relatively inexpensive to operate. If you just want to control moisture levels in a single room, a portable room humidifier is also up to the task.
Roth Heating & Cooling is proud to serve the home comfort needs of its Portland area customers. Contact us for more pointers on controlling humidity levels in your home.
