Is our humidity level something to be concerned about?

jacko220

Suggest you look at BS5250 for explanations of what is good and bad. I notice that a new edition has been published last year. Condensation is about the psychrometric chart

jacko220

Warm air can hold more moisture vapour than cold air see the curve on the chart. Interstitial Condensation can cause problems with timber frame houses and "cold" roof, the equilibrium moisture content (emc) if exceeded causes the timber to swell and decay. The other problem is that of bronchial complaints in the inhabitants like the young boy the other day. The water of condensation cause black mould to grow which can affect the breathing of the occupants.

jacko220

Causes the House dust mite to breed in damp conditions, the faeces'    of the house dust mite cause bronchial complaints in human beings. I lectured in this subject and other Building/Environmental Problems for nearly forty years if you have any questions please ask.

jacko220

Deleted_User said:

I'd consider anything in the high 60's to be too damp. After a bath (in our ensuite) our bedroom might go up t o71% or so and it feels kind of damp to me. 

For a while we used a dehumidifier to get it down lower. But that's a bit expensive to run - we found it wasn't enough just to have it on for an hour or two after a bath.

Last year we installed a woodburner and our entire house hovers around 50% despite constantly boiling water on the fire and having washing hanging in front of it to dry. So if that's something that appeals for other reasons it doubles up as a great way to dry your house.

Another thing to consider - when it's warm and wet out your humidity levels will go up and that's normal. When it's cold humidity levels should be lower. So high humidity (due to temporary warm air) when it's cold outside is what I worry about most - not least because it will condense on cold surfaces and cause dampness.

I think my little sensors say 'fine' until it gets to something like 67%. So yours isn't really bad I don't think and if you're not seeing dampness etc you probably don't need to worry.

I think our 50% is possibly getting a little bit too dry.

 Does the woodburner have a flue, condensation may escape through flue, sorry but when its cold outside it normally gets misty have a look at the pyschrometric chart, cold air holds less water vapour than warm air. 40-70% are comfortable conditions, however the higher the humidity in the general air the more it will condense at "cold" bridges, look at infra-red pictures of houses particularly around windows.

ashe

FreeBear said:

ashe said:

FreeBear said:

ashe said: We are having zigbee controllers wired onto the fans on Monday after which I'll put some humidity sensors in so that I can automate them coming on and set timers etc. the fan has a built in timer but we don't want it coming on for 10-15 minute overrun in the middle of the night when we go to the bathroom, so by doing it this way I'll have complete control. 

Ooooo... Are you going to use Home Assistant to do the automation ?

A small mains powered ESP32 board with a relay plus temperature/humidity sensor running ESPHome firmware would be the path I'd go. But once you start using home automation with sensors, you'll want to log the data, then add more sensors. Then it will need a dedicated storage device (SD cards only last a matter of months). It is a slippery slope down that rabbit hole, and I'm not even at the bottom yet (adding wiring here for a modbus network for yet more sensors).

Yeah I've got a qnap server I run for Emby in the house to our various TV's, so have installed Home Assistant in a docker. The route I've gone down for now is a ZigBee USB device for the server, as already have hue lighting and hue compatible smart switches, and picked up a couple of Aquara temp/humidity sensors. We've got some Sonoff ZigBee switches for the fans so once everything is set up should be able to link everything up. 

Luckily the QNAP has an 18TB hard drive in it and 3 spare bays for more so I hope to not get that much data  

Do you use Grafana for visualisation of the data ?

Don't use anything yet! Still waiting on the zigbee dongle to adrift and the humidity sensors are coming from china 😂

FreeBear

ashe said:

FreeBear said:

ashe said:

FreeBear said:

ashe said: We are having zigbee controllers wired onto the fans on Monday after which I'll put some humidity sensors in so that I can automate them coming on and set timers etc. the fan has a built in timer but we don't want it coming on for 10-15 minute overrun in the middle of the night when we go to the bathroom, so by doing it this way I'll have complete control. 

Ooooo... Are you going to use Home Assistant to do the automation ?

A small mains powered ESP32 board with a relay plus temperature/humidity sensor running ESPHome firmware would be the path I'd go. But once you start using home automation with sensors, you'll want to log the data, then add more sensors. Then it will need a dedicated storage device (SD cards only last a matter of months). It is a slippery slope down that rabbit hole, and I'm not even at the bottom yet (adding wiring here for a modbus network for yet more sensors).

Yeah I've got a qnap server I run for Emby in the house to our various TV's, so have installed Home Assistant in a docker. The route I've gone down for now is a ZigBee USB device for the server, as already have hue lighting and hue compatible smart switches, and picked up a couple of Aquara temp/humidity sensors. We've got some Sonoff ZigBee switches for the fans so once everything is set up should be able to link everything up. 

Luckily the QNAP has an 18TB hard drive in it and 3 spare bays for more so I hope to not get that much data  

Do you use Grafana for visualisation of the data ?

Don't use anything yet! Still waiting on the zigbee dongle to adrift and the humidity sensors are coming from china 😂

If you shove the data in to an Influx database, you can do fun stuff like diffs between sensors and/or comparisons with historical readings. I've only just starting to scratch the surface with Influx queries here and plotting the data (via Grafana).. But I've only got 2.5 years of data to work with despite running HA for a lot longer.