If you’re asked about when you’d use an air humidifier in your home, you’d probably say during heating season, when the outdoor humidity is low and your indoor air is extra dry from running the furnace. You might find it surprising that adding humidity can be beneficial in the summer too, when your air conditioner is running every day.
Why Your Indoor Humidity Drops in the Summer
Your home’s cooling system is designed to pull heat from the air indoors and send it outside. During the cooling process, your heat pump or A/C also draws moisture from the air, which is sent outdoors via a condensate drain. Our summer weather in the Calgary area isn’t excessively humid, so it’s easy for efficient cooling equipment to pull out too much moisture, resulting in a low indoor humidity level. If you have a whole-house humidifier added to your HVAC system, you can select a comfortable humidity level so it automatically adds a precise amount of moisture to your air supply.
Boosting the humidity level in your home when it drops too low in the summer can also help:
· Prevent health and comfort concerns. Excessively dry air can cause various health and comfort issues, such as brittle hair, headaches, itchy skin, nosebleeds, sinus problems and sore throats. It also increases the likelihood of developing colds, flus and respiratory infections caused by bacteria and viruses that flourish in dry conditions.
· Protect your home and its contents from damage. Without enough indoor moisture, your drywall, paint, wallpaper, wood trim and flooring can start to shrink and crack. Low humidity can also damage your wood furniture, artwork, books and musical instruments.
· Avoid problems from static electricity. When there’s a lack of sufficient moisture in your air, static electricity can cause painful, unexpected shocks. Even worse, these jolts of electricity can do irreparable damage to any sensitive electronic devices with semiconductors, such as your televisions, computers, game consoles and mobile phones.
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of using an air humidifier in your Calgary-area home during the summer, contact us at Arpi’s Industries.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Calgary, Alberta about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about humidifers and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide.
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