A Dehumidifier Helps Cool Your Home
When it comes to your home, maintaining a cool and comfortable atmosphere at all times is of the utmost importance. While your air conditioner typically solves this problem during summer months, running the air conditioner constantly can result in extremely high electric bills. A dehumidifier helps cool your home by removing moisture in the air, which allows you to run your air conditioner less frequently.
While an air conditioner can remove moisture from the air in well-ventilated areas, a dehumidifier takes this a step further by decreasing air humidity in all areas. A dehumidifier is most useful in poorly ventilated and damp areas such as basements or crawl spaces, which tend to hold moisture more than other rooms. To better understand how a dehumidifier helps keep your home cool, it is important to know how a dehumidifier removes moisture from the air.
How Humidity Causes Heat
One of the main factors that contributes to the temperature of your home is the level of humidity. Homes with excess humidity are inherently warmer, whereas homes with less humidity are cooler. Humidity can even make your home feel warmer than it really is because it creates the atmosphere of a sauna, which can cause excessive sweat that is unable to evaporate. This extreme sweating can be very uncomfortable and create something similar to a heat index since the home feels much warmer than the temperature indicates.
How a Dehumidifier Works
A dehumidifier works similarly to an air conditioner in that it removes excess moisture from the air to make a home cooler and reduce overall humidity. Unlike an air conditioner, however, a dehumidifier does not blow cool air into a room; it has two coils, a warm and cool one, that work to decrease humidity. In addition, it is much more cost-effective to cool your home by removing humidity from the air than to heat or cool it. Therefore, using a humidifier in conjunction with an air conditioner in summer months will enable you to run the air conditioner less.
While a dehumidifier does not necessarily act in place of an air conditioner on a hot summer day, it can make the temperature of your home more enjoyable and comfortable by removing excess moisture from the air and helping to cool your home.