What a damp Lake City house costs you from June to September, and the three questions to ask a dehumidifier
Start with the cost of living at 65 percent humidity: the thermostat set lower than it should be, and the closet that smells. Then interview the machine.
The cost, in thermostat degrees and closet smell
Lake City gets about 54 inches of rain a year, most of it in a June-to-September stretch when the air outdoors is near saturation every morning and the afternoon storm resets it. Indoors, a house that is cooling but not drying sits at 60 to 70 percent humidity. The costs of that are real and mostly hidden.
The first cost is on the thermostat. A damp house at 74 feels warmer than a dry house at 77, so people set it lower, and every degree lower is more compressor time on the FPL or Clay Electric bill. The second is the closet: at those humidity levels, mold grows on leather, drywall and the back of a bedroom closet in weeks. The third is the equipment: a system that short-cycles in humid air never runs long enough to dry anything and wears out faster. A whole-house dehumidifier addresses all three, and it typically pays for its own electricity by letting the thermostat come up a few degrees. We will not put a dollar figure on that here; your house and your rate decide it. The direction of the math is not in doubt.
Question one: will I hear it?
A ducted whole-house dehumidifier sits beside the air handler, in a Summers Ridge garage or a hallway closet in a Downtown ranch, and pushes dry air into the supply duct. From the living room it is inaudible; in the garage it sounds like a quiet window unit. Compare that with two or three portable units running in bedrooms, each with a compressor and a fan, each needing its bucket emptied. The ducted unit is quieter and it drains itself.
Question two: how dry is dry enough, and can it hold it?
The target is 50 percent or a little under, which is where mold stops and skin stops feeling sticky. The question Lake City homeowners rightly ask is whether a machine can hold that number on a 78-degree day with rain all afternoon. A properly sized ducted unit can, because it is sized to the house’s moisture load rather than its square footage, and because it runs on its own humidistat regardless of what the air conditioner is doing. That independence matters most in the shoulder months, April and October, when the thermostat is satisfied for hours but the air is still wet.
Ask about a whole-house dehumidifier
Question three: does drier mean cleaner?
Largely, yes. Dust mites and mold both need humidity above about 55 percent to thrive; hold the house at 50 and the biological side of indoor air quality improves without any filter being changed. Odors fade too, because the musty August smell is mostly microbial growth on damp surfaces. What a dehumidifier does not do is catch pollen or smoke; that is the filtration page. For a lot of Columbia County houses, though, humidity is the air quality problem, and the rest are footnotes.
The humidifier footnote: twenty dry nights after a front
Cook’s sells humidifiers, and a few Lake City households should own one. After a strong winter cold front, with outdoor temperatures in the 20s and the heat running, indoor humidity can fall into the 20s for a few days: dry skin, static, cracked woodwork on a piano. That happens perhaps two or three weeks a year here, in short spells. If your household includes instruments, fine furniture or someone with a respiratory condition that flares in dry air, a bypass humidifier at the air handler is a modest add-on. One caution specific to this county: humidifiers on hard, iron-bearing well water scale up quickly and need their pads changed on schedule, or they stop working and start growing things. For most houses, the dehumidifier is the purchase and the humidifier is a question to answer honestly: usually, no.
Humidity equipment questions from Columbia County
Can a dehumidifier run when the air conditioner is off, in October?
Yes, and that is exactly when it earns its keep. The shoulder months are mild enough that the air conditioner barely runs, but the air is still wet; the dehumidifier handles those weeks on its own, with the blower circulating the dry air.
Where does a whole-house unit put all the water?
Into a drain line, the same way the air handler does. On a Lake City summer day a unit can pull several gallons, so the line is pitched, trapped where needed and tested, and a float safety shuts the unit off if the drain ever backs up.
Would a few portable dehumidifiers in the bedrooms do the same job?
They would do part of it, loudly, while dumping their heat back into the rooms and needing their buckets emptied every day in July. A ducted unit treats the whole house, drains itself and runs out of earshot.
Is it really worth adding a humidifier for a Lake City winter?
For most houses, no. The dry spells after a cold front are short, a couple of weeks a year in total. A household with instruments, antiques or a respiratory condition may want one; everyone else is better off spending the money on the dehumidifier.
House cool and still clammy?
Tell us the humidity reading if you have one. If not, we will bring a meter.