Spring is a beautiful time of year. As the snow melts, you can almost feel the cloud of winter lifting. But with greener parks and fuller trees come seasonal allergies. Irritants in the air don’t just make it hard to enjoy a walk outside, they can follow you indoors too.
Luckily, there are ways to safeguard your home’s indoor air quality this coming spring.
Every building has to be resilient enough to deal with environmental factors. Your home is no different. Depending on your location, some seasons may introduce more issues than others. Due to Pennsylvania’s humid continental climate, high humidity can affect indoor air quality in Malvern, PA—especially going into summer.
But what issues can it create and, more importantly, what solutions are available to you?
Humidity and indoor air quality
Humidity is the concentration of water vapor in the air. Relative humidity (RH) is the percentage of moisture currently in the air, based on how much the air can hold in total. Outdoors, 100% RH is usually a sign of dew, fog, or rain.
Health experts recommend keeping indoor relative humidity between 30–50% for ideal conditions. Excessive indoor humidity can reduce air quality and present the following issues.
Mold and mildew prefer growing in wet and damp conditions. They rely on moisture to spread across surfaces like ceilings, tiles, and walls, which is more likely when there’s a lot of indoor humidity. If left too long, mold releases irritants into the air that can aggravate allergies and asthma.
As fungi, mold, and mildew feed on organic materials to grow, they can damage textiles like carpets, curtains, and soft furnishings as a result. Depending on how extensive a case is, mildew can creep onto bedding, soft toys, and clothing. While many home remedies exist, prevention is always the first line of protection.
Humidity can damage walls as moisture from warm air condenses on cooler surfaces. Dampness can cause surface leeching on new paint and lead to curling on the wallpaper, aging the walls prematurely.
Lastly, high humidity makes your home feel warmer, emphasizing the summer heat when all you want to do is stay shaded and cool. Humid air stores heat better than dry air, forcing your air conditioning system to work harder to lower the temperature. If you live in a humid summer area, this might be why your thermostat readings don’t always match how warm you feel.
Whole-house dehumidifier: the perfect solution
A dehumidifier is the best way to control indoor humidity because it treats the main cause of the issues above. Its refrigerated coils condense water vapor as humid air moves through the unit, filtering out moisture before releasing cooler, drier air.
Whole-house dehumidifiers are particularly effective at creating ideal conditions (allowing for 45% relative humidity). They’re more powerful than their portable counterparts, working with your air conditioning system to regulate temperature efficiently.
Thanks to its range, a whole-house dehumidifier maintains good air quality throughout a house, protecting the structure and ventilating out of sight areas too.
Get the best HVAC professionals for your dehumidifier installation…
Looking for an HVAC service to help you get better indoor air quality in Malvern, PA? Michall Daimion Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc. has been the Main Line’s Premier Service Provider since 1976. Contact us today to speak to a service expert about our solutions!
Seasonal changes affect your HVAC system in different ways. Traditionally, the advice around protecting your furnace says to have a professional inspection late in the fall, just before winter. This is perfectly sound advice, but there’s just as much value to running a performance check-in post-winter too.
Winter is every heating system’s busiest period. After months of peak use, your furnace is at its most vulnerable coming out winter. A check-in here can offer you vital insights into your furnace’s efficiency, performance, and repair needs.
Let’s go over some simple ways to examine your furnace at home. If you notice any of these signs, it’s time to book a professional HVAC service for repair and maintenance.
There’s nothing worse than being surprised by an unusually high utility bill at the end of the month. When you invest in an efficient heating system, you expect to see the financial benefits for a long time. The trouble is, no matter how good your heater is, problems in the ductwork can cancel out its quality.
Here are five big ways poor ductwork affects your heating system and electric bill. If you spot any of these issues, it’s time to call an HVAC repair service. Let’s break them down.
Thanks to modern HVAC systems, keeping your home warm in the winter has never been easier. The right unit gives you everything you need to keep your space comfortable no matter the weather. But even the best heating units need maintenance. If you’re experiencing cold spots around the house even when your heater is running, that’s probably a sign that it’s due for service.
While the next step is to contact an HVAC professional, being aware of potential issues can remove a lot of stress. So let’s break down 5 common reasons for cold spots around the house.
The biggest piece of advice that we can give to any homeowner about their HVAC system is to regularly change its filter. It’s an easy step to do, but also an easy one for people to forget. It might seem like it isn’t a serious problem to leave the filter in place for a few more months, but clogged and dirty air filters are the source of numerous HVAC problems that are otherwise easy to avoid.
When you schedule any maintenance tune-up with our technicians (heating or air conditioning), they’ll change out the filter as part of the service. They can show you where the filter is located and how to change it—it’s easy, trust us! You will need to do the changes yourself until the next maintenance appointment. We recommend checking the filter monthly to see if it’s fully congested. The filter will need to be changed every 1 to 3 months.
It’s that time of year again—the end of the year! That means many people are beginning to think about their resolutions for the new year.
We’d like to help! We can provide you with some excellent and easily achievable resolutions that are all about your heating, air conditioning, and ventilation system. With the proper HVAC service in West Chester, PA—which only requires calling Michall Daimion Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc.—you can have most of your resolutions completed in no time.
We often take the heating systems in our homes for granted. We imagine that each winter when we need them, they’ll turn on and deliver the cozy warmth necessary to make winter a joy rather than a burden. Then the heaters shut down for the middle of the year and people stop thinking about them, making it even easier to forget that, well, one day those heaters will fail.
We don’t recommend you allow your home’s heating system to run and run until it completely breaks down. That puts you in a bad position and can even lead to dangerous heater operation right before. We advise you to get ahead of a failed central heater and know when it’s best to schedule a replacement with our Phoenixville, PA, HVAC professionals.
To help with this, we’re going to look into a key question: “How long can you expect your central heater to keep working for you?”
We don’t want to act alarmist about gas furnaces, because they’re generally safe options for home heating. Furnace manufacturers build gas furnaces with safety features and must meet strict standards. If you take care of your furnace with regular maintenance each fall, it has little chance of becoming dangerous.
But we want to bring your attention to a furnace problem that’s the most common cause for a gas furnace becoming unsafe: a cracked heat exchanger. If this happens to your furnace, you’ll either need immediate heating repair in Bryn Mawr, PA or a full furnace replacement.
It’s a fact of life in Pennsylvania: homes need heating systems running during the winter. And heating systems require energy to power them, and energy costs money. As the winter weather settles in, you can expect to see a rise in your utility bills.
If you come to this post, it’s probably because you think you’re paying too much to heat your house. You’re likely right: we’ve offered HVAC service in Newtown Square, PA for more than 40 years, and we’ve seen the many ways homeowners can inadvertently increase heating costs.
We’re here to help you overcome unnecessarily high heating charges. We can’t make your heating free, but we can help you not feel so afraid of looking at your monthly utility bills during winter.
Let’s get started…
(610)644-0537