A whole-home dehumidifier keeps your indoor environment in the healthy and comfortable zone. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends maintaining indoor relative humidity below 60 percent. Here in Eastern North Carolina, daily high humidity levels average between 70 percent to 80 percent all summer long.

Since outdoor humidity directly influences indoor readings, maintaining the recommended level inside the house becomes problematic. Running your air conditioner extracts some water vapor from the air. However, dehumidifying is not the primary function of an A/C. Often, the added capacity of a whole-home dehumidifier is required to keep indoor levels below 60 percent in summer.

Why Humidity Matters

Because humid air holds more heat energy than dry air, a humid indoor environment feels much warmer and less comfortable. Usually the air conditioner thermostat setting is bumped down even lower in an attempt to compensate. This means more energy consumption and higher operating costs, yet still doesn’t result in efficient, effective cooling.
Indoor humidity above 50 percent triggers toxic mold growth that spreads through airborne spores. Mold is a known cause of allergic responses and illness in susceptible individuals. Dust mites, another airborne irritant, also thrive in humid indoor conditions.

The Whole-Home Solution

Humidity migrates throughout the entire house, so portable individual room dehumidifiers offer only a partial and short-lived solution. A whole-home dehumidifier is directly installed inside the HVAC ductwork. Because the entire air volume inside the house circulates through the ducts multiple times each day, a whole-home humidifier extracts humidity from all the air, all the time — not just single, enclosed rooms. A digital humidistat installed in the living spaces just like a thermostat allows residents to input a desired relative humidity setting. The dehumidifier automatically adjusts indoor levels to that precise level and maintains it there, 24 hours a day.

A whole-home dehumidifier is permanently installed in the ductwork by a qualified HVAC contractor and directly connected to the household plumbing system. No daily draining of the unit or other maintenance is required.

For more about the comfort and health benefits of a whole-home dehumidifier, contact Jackson & Sons.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Eastern North Carolina (including Wayne, Johnston, Greene, Lenoir, and Duplin Counties) about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).