Preventing the growth of mold in your home is an important aspect of owning a home, as even minor mold growth can make your home less healthy and less pleasant, to say nothing of the havoc a serious mold infestation can wreak upon your property and the expense of remediation. Today, we’ll talk about how dehumidifiers can help your home stay mold-free, or at least low-mold, given the ubiquity of spores.
How Does Humidity Cause Mold?
Mold will grow as quickly as it can in any environment, including your home and its myriad surfaces. A damp environment is a great environment for mold to grow fast. Because mold spores are nearly impossible to keep out of your house, any place in your home that stays damp will almost certainly become moldy with time as those spores find the damp place and begin to expand.
In a humid home, damp areas won’t dry out because there is no room in the air for the water. In a severely humid home, otherwise dry areas might become slightly damp just from ambient moisture being deposited on surfaces.
How Does A Dehumidifier Help Combat Mold?
A dehumidifier does exactly what the name implies: it removes moisture from your home’s air and thus reduces humidity. Unlike an air conditioner, which does a bit of this incidentally, a dehumidifier works exclusively to monitor and control your home’s humidity levels. Keeping your home at around 50% humidity can help control the growth of mold and, in turn, improve indoor air quality.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to have moldy surfaces professionally treated. Home remedies like bleach often do not eliminate mold that has already penetrated porous surfaces. Once mold has been removed, use a dehumidifier to prevent mold from recurring.
Other Benefits of a Dehumidifier
Dehumidifiers aren’t just about keeping mold at bay, as important as that may be. Keeping your humidity from going higher than 55 or 60% offers a wealth of benefits to any home:
- Helps your AC run more efficiently: Your air conditioner needs to work harder in a damp environment to achieve the same results, meaning you’ll spend more money for the same level of comfort if you don’t control humidity.
- Improves comfort in the summer: When the air in your home is humid, it’s harder for your body to rid itself of heat via sweating, because sweat can’t evaporate in a high-humidity environment. Controlling humidity can actually make you feel cooler without turning down the AC.
- Helps control pests: Like mold, many household pets thrive on a damp environment. Mites, roaches, and other pests big and small need water as much as we do, and the humidity of a damp environment can be plenty to support an invasive population in your walls and ceilings.
- Protects household items from damage: Many items in your home can be damaged by high levels of humidity, not just from mold but from the presence of moisture alone. Electronics, artwork, wood furniture, carpets, and wood floors can all be susceptible to water damage.
Our Whole-Home Dehumidifier Services
At Home Comfort Services, we install high-quality whole-home dehumidifiers. These are the best option by far for managing humidity in your home, addressing humidity in the air that passes through your ductwork and air handler.
While a standalone portable dehumidifier or a rudimentary solution such as moisture absorption buckets can help a bit in a particular problem area, such as a kitchen or basement with moisture issues, for general high humidity these solutions fall short. A dehumidifier that’s part of your general HVAC system can treat all of the air in your home as it circulates, ensuring consistent humidity throughout your home.
Why Choose Home Comfort Services?
At Home Comfort, we take your comfort seriously from beginning to end. We make scheduling painless with great customer service, handle your HVAC needs with knowledge and professionalism, and make everything easy with upfront pricing and straightforward financing options. You can always count on our well-trained and background-checked technicians to deliver great results, no matter your HVAC needs.
Contact Home Comfort today to get started managing the humidity of your home with a new dehumidifier installation in our Northeast Chicagoland service area.
