How Humidity Affects Your Household HVAC Performance

Regardless of the time of year, significant humidity can negatively affect your HVAC unit over time. In the Twin Cities, where year-round humidity levels tend to be fairly high, it’s important to understand how humidity affects your system, so you can take the appropriate protective actions.

At Dust Doctors, it’s our goal to help you take proper care of your HVAC unit and ductwork while also helping you maintain clean, high-quality indoor air. To help you maintain your unit and breathe better air, in this blog, we explain how humidity can negatively affect your HVAC unit and what you can do to help prevent problems.

Humidity and Air Conditioning

When your A/C system is working efficiently, it should remove both heat and moisture from the air inside your home. But when your outdoor HVAC unit is bogged down by dust, dirt, and debris accumulation, it cannot perform its job efficiently, which can leave moisture in the air and make indoor temperature regulation a challenge.

Worse, when moisture from the humid air collects inside the unit, it essentially coagulates any the existing debris, further clogging up the system. The result? Your A/C must work harder than necessary to cool your home, which drives up the cost of your energy bills and overstresses the system. Moreover, when there’s too much moisture in your indoor air, your home is at a higher risk for mold and mildew development and certain forms of deterioration.

You can avoid this issue by scheduling routine A/C cleaning and maintenance, ideally at yearly intervals. A thorough, professional cleaning of your unit will remove both moisture and debris. This will allow the system to return to normal operating levels and ultimately, reduce your cooling costs.

Humidity and Heating

Because humidity levels tend to drop during the colder months of the year, your home probably won’t be affected by too much moisture. Instead, it’s more likely to have the opposite problem. When your furnace runs 24/7 to heat your home, it continually pulls moisture out of the indoor air.

Because ambient moisture makes the air feel warmer than it really is, a lack of indoor moisture can make your home feel significantly cooler than the setting on your thermostat. This situation also presents a challenge for indoor temperature regulation. The system must work longer and more frequently to heat your home to a comfortable temperature, which again, drives up energy bills and stresses the furnace.

Fortunately, you can mitigate this issue by situating humidifiers throughout your home to reintroduce much-needed moisture into the air. In addition to using humidifiers throughout the winter, it’s also highly recommended to schedule professional furnace cleaning on an annual basis. Keeping the system clean helps maximize system performance while also reducing the chance of premature breakdown.

If you’re ready to maximize your HVAC system performance, get in touch with our team at Dust Doctors today. We specialize in a/c cleaning and repair; furnace cleaning and repair; and multiple types of duct cleaning for homeowners throughout the Twin Cities and the surrounding metro. To learn more about our services or request a free quote, give us a call today at 651-319-9777 or send us a message, and we’ll get back to you promptly.