About Us - Tips & Advice

In the good old days, houses were a long way from being air tight. They breathed, usually through the windows and doors. The windows and doors were simply not very good at keeping inside and outside weather inside and outside, respectively.

Heat travels to cold. Moisture travels to dryness. Ultimately, both heat and moisture want to negotiate with cold and dry until everybody is equal. Basically, heat and cold and wet and dry want to reach equilibrium or balance with their respective opposite.

Nature does not like things that are not in balance, and so, since the air inside of a home in winter is both warmer and wetter than is the air outside of the home, nature does not like this situation and tries very hard to fix it.

In the old days this was very simple, the house wasn't tight (especially around the windows) and all that heat and moist air simply went through the windows and attempted to equalize with the cold, dry air outside. Since this wasn't even remotely physically possible, it became a continuous cycle, warm up the air inside the home and out it goes trying very hard to make the outside warm.

The people living in the house had other ideas about that situation, however, and they pumped prodigious amounts of heat into that house in an attempt to stay warm. This worked, within reason, but the homes were then very dry. People generally attributed this to the warm air from the furnace "drying" out the air in the house when it was actually because moisture from inside the house was migrating to outside the house along with the warm air; nature's attempt to equalize the inside and outside temperature and moisture levels as well.

As air inside warms up it does feel dryer than it did when it was cooler, the relative humidity goes down as the temperature goes up. The warmth isn't actually drying the air, it is simply changing our perception of it.

When the air became very dry, it was not very comfortable, so people began to add moisture to their air in an attempt to raise the relative humidity to more comfortable levels. As long as the house remained relatively loose, this "new" warm and moist air migrated to the outside and was replaced inside.

But, newer houses are tighter. Newer windows are tighter. We have caused a rift between what Mother Nature intended and what we allow her to do. We are trying very hard to keep the heat inside our homes and avoiding it going outside. This has the added "benefit" of also keeping moisture inside as well, often more than we would like to keep inside.

Houses today are often too wet, rather than too dry. In the winter furnace humidifiers are often "overkill" for the requirements of today's homes. Obviously, I would never suggest that a home will never need additional humidification, but in today's world it is also not correct to say that all homes will need humidification either. It is very dependent on both the construction of the home and the lifestyle of the people living in it. And obviously, there are many, many houses that are still leaking air and moisture to the outside in the winter.