Hey all... Living in the Midwest we've had lots of rain and lots of humidity, plus lots of heat. Yesterday it was 86 with a dew-point of 74, around 70% humidity.
I want to reduce the humidity of the house, the basement has had a hard time fully drying after some minor flooding... We have central air doing some dehumidifying, and a dehumidifier in the basement which I've placed in a threshold with a box fan a few feed directly in front... It's working, but I'm fighting the ambient humidity of the outdoors. Since we keep the house around 75F the basement stays around 70, which was well below the dewpoint yesterday.
I've read other posts on here about using calcium chloride, so I have an old laundry detergent jug filled with it sitting in a larger bucket with several dozen small holes drilled in sitting on the other side of the fan... have yet to see much out of it though.
But I've got this other idea regarding the dewpoint... Wouldn't all of these means of dehumidifying work more efficiently if the air were chilled? Essentially wring out the sponge that is the air?
At night it can get cool here... Frequently into the upper 50's... Now obviously I've been keeping the doors and windows closed despite how nice it would be to draw in some cool air, because it'd be 100% humidity air.... But what if I just rain the AC all night, chilling the house down to say 60F?
At that point, most of the remaining humidity indoors would be wrung out... hopefully via the dehumidifier and AC... Then I could just allow the house to warm itself back up naturally the following morning. The AC demand would be higher at night, but offset by lower AC usage in the day.
Edit: I should add that the relative humidity of the basement has been around 65-75% due to the dehumidifier running... that's at around 70F ambient temp indoors... Obviously the actual humidity is much lower than outdoors, but not low enough to fully dry the floor. Sans dehumidifier it's closer to 85%.
Is this idea sound? Or am I missing something?
July 19, 2017 at 01:54PM
