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What Is Humidity?: Gas Water Central Heating

Humidity refers to the amount of water vapor in the air. While indoor humidity is usually invisible, high levels can cause issues like mold, electrical problems, and health issues. A dehumidifier removes excess moisture from the air through refrigeration or absorption processes. It works by pulling in humid air, cooling it below the dew point so water condenses out, then rewarming and returning the now dry air to the room while collecting the water. Larger dehumidifiers are generally more efficient at removing water.

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Giftson Immanuel
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85 views6 pages

What Is Humidity?: Gas Water Central Heating

Humidity refers to the amount of water vapor in the air. While indoor humidity is usually invisible, high levels can cause issues like mold, electrical problems, and health issues. A dehumidifier removes excess moisture from the air through refrigeration or absorption processes. It works by pulling in humid air, cooling it below the dew point so water condenses out, then rewarming and returning the now dry air to the room while collecting the water. Larger dehumidifiers are generally more efficient at removing water.

Uploaded by

Giftson Immanuel
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What is humidity?

Most of the time we don't give a moment's thought to the atmosphere in our
homes (or outside); why should we, it's invisible! If we think about it at all, we
tend to think of it as a gas. Look up at the sky and you see a different point of
view. Clouds whizzing over your head are a sure sign that the air
contains water, either as a vapor (if it's dry) or liquid (if it's actually raining).
But the same is true inside your home. You might think the air is dry—and if
you have central heating, it might even feel that way—but there's a huge
amount of moisture around you too. If you dry laundry inside your home or do
a lot of stove-top cooking without proper ventilation, the humidity levels can be
surprisingly high. Condensation on the windows (or, even worse, water
dripping down the walls—as it sometimes does in my kitchen) is a sure sign of
a humidity problem.

Photo: Water-absorbing silica gel, often packaged in little paper bags inside camera and binocular cases,
effectively tackles small amounts of humidity. But it's no help if you have a major excess of moisture in your
home. For that, you need a proper dehumidifier.

Why does indoor humidity matter?


We're walking water bags—adult bodies are typically 60 percent water—but
that doesn't mean our homes should be like fish tanks! High humidity can
cause all kinds of problems. It can make clothing go moldy in your cupboard,
it's bad for computers (it can cause rusting or short circuits inside their cases)
and optical equipment (that's why things like cameras and binoculars are sold
with water-absorbing sachets of silica gel)—and it's bad for your health too.
According to a scientific review of the health effects of humidity published in
1986 by Arundel et al, high levels of indoor humidity can encourage a
flourishing of bacteria, viruses, mites and fungi, and more respiratory
infections and sicknesses: "The majority of adverse health effects caused by
relative humidity would be minimized by maintaining indoor levels between 40
and 60%."

What does a dehumidifier do?


A dehumidifier is a bit like a vacuum cleaner: it sucks in air from your room at
one end, takes the moisture out of it, and then blows it back out into the room
again. The moisture drips through into a collection tank that you have to
empty, from time to time. How is the moisture removed? That's where a
dehumidifier is more like an air conditioning unit (sometimes called an air-con
or HVAC, which stands for heating ventilating air conditioning unit), which,
itself, works a bit like a refrigerator! Confused by all these appliances? Let's
look inside a dehumidifier and find out what all the bits do.

How a dehumidifier works


Dehumidifiers work in one of two ways—by refrigeration (cooling air to
remove moisture using similar technology to a refrigerator) or
by absorption/adsorption (where moisture is absorbed into or adsorbed onto
a drying material and then removed). We'll look at each of these in turn.

Refrigeration
1. Warm, moist air is sucked in through a grille on
one side of the machine.
2. An electric fan draws the air inward.
3. The warm air passes over freezing cold pipes
through which a coolant circulates. (Note: We've
simplified this part of the machine quite a lot. It's
like a mini air-
conditioner or refrigerator endlessly circulating
coolant with a pump and compressor.) As the air
cools, the moisture it contains turns back into
liquid water and drips downward off the pipes.
4. Now free of moisture, the air passes over
a heating element (similar to the one in a fan
heater) and warms back up to its original
temperature.
5. Warm, dry air blows back into the room through
another grille.
6. The moisture that was in the air originally drips
down into a collecting tray (or bucket) at the
bottom of the machine.
7. A plastic float in the machine rises upward as
the collecting tray fills up.
8. When the tray is full, the float trips an electric
switch that turns off the fan and switches on an
indicator light telling you the machine needs
emptying.
Absorption/adsorption

Not all dehumidifiers work by refrigeration. Some work by "mopping" the water
out of the air with a water-holding material and then "squeezing" the water
away to remove it. The mopping action involves either absorption (where the
water soaks right into something) or adsorption (where the water is picked up
on the surface of something).

I haven't been able to discover if there was an original inventor of the


dehumidifier—someone who first came up with the idea of removing water
from air with a machine—or if the idea evolved gradually over time. Willis
Carrier, pioneer of the air conditioner, is certainly one strong candidate; his
machines were largely based on refrigeration technology and, although
described as "air conditioners," could remove moisture from air too. Another
early contender is James Locke, who produced this ingenious absorption
dehumidifier and air conditioner for Honeywell in 1939/1940. I've colored it in
and picked out a few of the key components to illustrate the basic principle,
but I'm going to gloss over the details.
Artwork: Diagram from US Patent 2,219,547: Air Conditioning System by James Locke, courtesy of US Patent
and Trademark Office.

How does it work?

1. Moist air is drawn in from the room through a


duct.
2. The air moves past a large rotating wheel made
of water-absorbing material, which removes the
humidity.
3. The air is drawn by a fan operated by an electric
motor.
4. Dry air is blown back out into the room.
5. An air duct underneath is kept hot by an electric
heating element (yellow).
6. The moisture-absorbing wheel rotates through
the heated air space and has hot air blown past
it to dry it out.
7. The air is sucked past by a fan and electric
motor similar to the one up above.
8. The hot, wet air is blown out through an exhaust
duct.

As you'd expect from Honeywell, the whole thing is controlled


by thermostats and humidity sensors so you can make the room as hot and
dry as you wish. The black lines you can see on the right and bottom of the
picture mostly show electric circuits controlling the machine. The main room
thermostat is at the top, shown in gray.

If you're interested, you can find more about how it works by reading
Locke's US Patent 2,219,547: Air Conditioning System.

How do you compare dehumidifiers?


According to The Code of Federal Regulations of the United States of
America, there are two key measurements you can use:

Water removed per day

The simplest one is how much water a dehumidifier removes, measured in


liters (or pints) collected in 24 hours of continuous operation: bigger machines
will obviously draw out more water than smaller ones. If you have a lot of
water to shift very quickly, perhaps after a river flood, this will be the best
measurement to go by. In an emergency like this, you don't really care how
much electricity you're using, since (hopefully) it will only be for a fairly short
time.

Efficiency

If you're using a dehumidifier for much longer (perhaps on a permanent basis,


because you live in a damp basement), you'll also need to study how much
power your machine consumes. The best measurement in this case is the
efficiency of the machine (sometimes called its energy factor), which is how
much water it removes divided by how much power it uses, measured in liters
(or pints) per kilowatt hour (L/kWh).

What about the wattage?

The wattage (power consumption) alone isn't going to tell you how good a
dehumidifier is, but, generally speaking, a higher wattage means the machine
will be working harder and removing more water per hour. I've just looked up
figures for a couple of machines to do a direct comparison. A typical mini
table-top dehumidifier uses about 20 watts of power, extracts 250ml (0.25
liters) of water per day, and has a tank capacity of 500ml (0.5 liters), while a
typical big wheelable dehumidifier removes 50 liters of water per day (200
times more), and uses about 1000 watts. The big machine will extract 50 liters
in one day and use 24kWh of energy in the process; the small machine will
take 4 days to extract a single liter and 200 days to remove 50 liters, so using
200 × 24 hours × 0.02 kW = 96kWh to do it. So the big machine is 200 times
faster and four times more energy efficient—something you can't tell by
comparing the two wattage figures alone.

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