Most people do not realize what significant role moisture plays in their daily lives and how removing it from the air can improve their comfort and safety. Among other functions, air conditioners reduce humidity!
What effect does humidity have on you and your home?
Feeling Hotter
Humidity is a powerful factor that determines how comfortable we are. When the humidity is high, we feel physically hotter. By reducing the moisture in our indoor air, the room will actually feel cooler, despite being the same temperature.
Humid Air is Unhealthy
Too much water in the air can also damage our health. Breathing very humid air strains the lungs and heart, which can aggravate many medical conditions.
It also breeds bacteria, helping along the germs sitting in your bathroom and kitchen. Bacteria will also hang in the air longer in humid conditions facilitating the transmission of illness from one person to the other in the household.
It’s not only the water you breathe, but what else is in the air. Allergy sufferers beware! When the moisture level in the air is too high, it breeds mold and dust mites.
Damaging to Your Home
If you leave a magazine in the bathroom when you shower, you will ruin the pages. What was once straight and crisp sheets of glossy paper, suddenly become wavy and dull. This demonstrates the deteriorating power of moisture at an accelerated rate.
When our homes have too much humidity in the air, the results don’t happen quite as fast. But eventually, you’ll find that your books, wood furniture, paintings, and photographs don’t look good anymore.
AC Humidity Solutions
Dehumidifying is a crucial function of modern cooling systems. Your central air conditioner system is designed to remove some (not all) humidity from the air as it cools it.
In fact, one of the first air conditioners was invented to dehumidify a printing press. It was never intended to reduce the temperature!
But the invention was eventually repurposed for the sake of better health and indoor comfort.
The AC Parts at Play
Today, our central air conditioners have two units, one indoor and one outdoor. The indoor unit cools and dehumidifies while the one outdoors discards heat from the coolant and returns it to a liquid state.
Your indoor AC unit pumps coolant (also known as refrigerant) through pipes known as evaporator coils. A blower fan or a fan from your furnace pulls warm air from your home and pushes it through the coils.
The refrigerant is pressurized before entering the indoor unit to make it frigid cold. As the hot air is forced through the coils, the coolant draws heat from the air.
This causes the refrigerant to become hot as it leaves your home to go to the outdoor unit. There, it cools off.
So where does the dehumidifying process come in?
Remember that the coils are frigid cold. Just like your icy cold can of soda or beer, the cold surface collects moisture from the air that you can visibly see as “sweat” or water droplets.
The water that collects on the evaporator coils, drips off and is collected in a pan. From there, gravity sends it outside through a small tube. You might see a dripping tube or puddle somewhere near your outdoor unit where the water is safely discarded where it cannot damage your property.
But Does an Air Conditioner Reduce Humidity Enough?
Although we have learned how your air conditioner reduces humidity, it’s not the only way to limit the humid air in your home or business.
Here in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, our climate is subtropical, and that means we experience an extreme amount of humidity. All of that moisture can make it difficult for an AC system to remove enough water from the air to make a big difference.
The evaporator coils can only pick up so much water at one time, which means that your living quarters could still feel damp and sticky.
That’s why many of our customers opt to have a dehumidifier installed along with their conventional central air conditioning unit. The additional dehumidifying power will leave your indoor air fresh and crisp no matter how muggy it is outside.
So if your air conditioner isn’t reducing the humidity enough for your liking, give us a call and we can discuss the right solution for you.