How to Stop Damp Mould & Condensation - a COMPLETE Guide

and the since I've moved into this old cottage ten years ago I've been grappling with condensation and mould in the cold winter months so in today's video I'm going to tell you what causes it what steps you can put in place chocolate and what steps I've taken and how effective days have been through some pretty exhaustive research I've been carrying out over the last two years the over this video is to demystify this difficult subject so that I can help you tackle the problems you've got in your own home [Applause] now dampen bold and to a lesser extent condensation problems stemming from the humidity levels in your house or relative humidity levels will come on to that later baby - hi so that's quickly run through the five main sources or generators of moisture humidity in your home number one we've got cooking and kettle boiling number two we've got bathing number three washing number four breathing and that accounts for half and liter a day per person and if you're exercising in your house you can probably triple that and number five moisturizer in the house through basements crawl spaces and walls now these moisture generators exist all year-round but in the winter the problem comes to a head because the winter is heating season we close our windows and we reduce ventilation and circulation of the air in our home to keep out the cold the same time rain and melting snow can increase the moisture entering our home through the crawl spaces basements and walls as I mentioned just now as less moisture leaves the house that humidity levels start to rise at the same time you get condensation because past the house that are in direct contact with the cold air outside are cooler than the air inside and an example of that is single glazed windows and insulated walls the temperature difference combined with warm moist air can cause condensation on those surfaces so what happens if you fail to manage that increased moisture during the winter months well for a start all that wetness will attract mold growth and moisture stains and in the worst case as you can see here the fabric of your house particularly plasterboard will start to rot unsurprisingly it can also have an adverse impact on our health as we need normal humidity to feel comfortable too much moisture can cause allergies and the static conditions dust mites for example thrive at 23 to 27 degrees or a relative humidity of 70 to 80% but actually stopped growing and died out at humidities of less than 60% and modern US humid conditions at a relative humidity of 80% mold will grow 50% of the time and mold spores can contribute to in children and colleges and finally excessive moisture has an impact on electronics as well it can correct contacts and cause short circuits as I found out to mike us when I left my dad's Olympus om one camera in my damp basement so that's all pretty straightforward and dare I say a bit obvious but this is where it gets more interesting because if you're gonna understand your own humidity problems the extent of those problems or what you've got to do to solve them you've got to be able to measure the humidity in your own home and point to you've got to understand a little bit more about the science behind it so a year ago when I started researching for this video I bought this hygrometer this gives me the ability to measure indoor temperature but also humidity in both Celsius and Fahrenheit more recently to capture as much data as possible I bought this additional hydrometer this is a wireless indoor and outdoor humidity and temperature monitor it comes with an additional sensor which has given me the ability not only to set up another internal temperature point but also to monitor the outdoor temperature and relative humidity these things are cheap and an absolutely essential purchase if you're gonna tackle the problems you've got in your house I'm showing you eBay prices here I bought mine from Amazon but some reason they're currently unavailable on the amazon website and why have you got to measure relative humidity well because anything below 30% is too dry as indeed you find sometimes outside during the winter because you can get chapped lips dry skin and itchy eyes you want your house to have a relative humidity of between 40 and 60% anything over 60% can lead to the mold damp and conversation problems we've just discussed and a quick glance of the hygrometer shows you what the relative humidity levels are in your house at any given moment but what I keep talking about relative humidity rather than just humidity well put simply you can't just talk about humidity in isolation because the temperature of the air affects the amount of moisture the air can hold vapor pressure also comes into it but we won't worry too much about that in today's video so relative humidity is the amount of moisture in the air relative to the amount of moisture that air can hold influenced by its temperature in short the warmer the air the higher is capacity to hold moisture and that's really important because when you go out and buy your hygrometer and turn the heating on you'll actually find the relative humidity level in your house drops now that doesn't mean the moisture content in your airs dropped far from it what that means is that capacity of the air to hold moisture has gone up so if anything you're just masking the problem that already exists and here are a few examples to illustrate the point a drop in temperature of 10 degrees Celsius Harv's the amount of moisture that the air can hold now a 100 percent relative humidity is also called the dew point and you'll see here from this graph I pull it off Wikipedia the amount of water in our 100% relative humidity across the range of temperatures linked to this and everything else I've referred to in this video will be in the description below the video so why is he boring us about relative humidity I hear you ask well I'll tell you why it's really important to understand relative humidity if you can get to the bottom of why you're getting condensation on your windows and here's why condensation forms when airborne water vapor comes in contact with a surface which is colder than the dew point and by that surface we're typically talking here about single glazed windows and what happens is that surface cools the air immediately next to the window itself and as we now know when you call out it can't hold as much moisture so the net result is the relative humidity in that little area of air next the window goes up when that relative humidity level gets to a hundred percent it reaches saturation point or its dew point and the air next to the window can't hold any more moisture so it deposits it on the cold window so what you've effectively got on what I've got with my bay windows is a massive dehumidifier not very helpful for us but you can understand why it's a dehumidifier because it's basically extracting moisture out of the air and talk of dehumidifiers brings us neatly on to the final part of this video what we can do to resolve our humidity problems now the gold standard for damp mold condensation management is new builds that incorporate complete home ventilation systems that basically keep the air around the home constantly circulated these systems are enjoyed because they remove the existing air through multiple extraction points and pump in fresh filtered air crucially via the heat exchanger they ensure that 95% of the heat that was in the air already is retained in spite of the fact that they're constantly recycling it and the other thing they do is actively monitor the relative humidity levels so that they can boost the system should those levels rise too high an example being this newer home ventilation system that was in a new build that I was measuring up for soft furnishings in last week that even has a heat extraction point in the comms cupboard but sadly you and I don't have access to these sophisticated home ventilation systems so for the remainder of this video I'm going to run through the things that we can do to creatively tackle the humidity problems that you and I've got in our homes I'm gonna be touching quickly on three main points lifestyle dehumidifiers and insulation so what do I mean by lifestyle well dam mold condensation problems are often attributable to lifestyle remember when we were talking let's start about the main sources of moisture in our home cooking bathing washing breathing now obviously we can't do much about hot breathing but we can have a massive impact on the moisture being released into the air through these other sources when it comes to cooking if you've got an extract fan you should always use it and in fact when we forget to use ours the windows very quickly get covered in condensation to have a massive impact on removing moisture from the room when it comes to boiling the kettle I always phone catch the kettle just after the water starts at boiling core be OCD but just look how long this kettle balls for if you don't and if your kettle is anything like mine it's releasing ridiculous amount of moisture into the air as opposed using up too much electricity and when I've used that capital I typically put a bit of cold water in so that it doesn't sit there steaming for the next ten minutes if you haven't got one already you should really try and install an extract fan in your bathrooms or something like this this one switches on when you turn on the lights and only switches off when the inbuilt humid stat decides that the moisture levels have dropped to the right level this is particularly good for landlords anxious to keep moisture levels low in rental properties where you don't want your tenants to override and switch off the extractor fan the next to bathroom washer management points are really important that's sadly something that landlords cannot have any control over their tenants on in our house we have a strict rule of opening the window when we have a shower which is mostly comply with what docks is getting a bit slack on it and you can see from this clip just how much moisture escapes through the window during showering and finally our fridge shall we've got into the habit of squeezing down the shower screen walls and even the shower tray fundamentally this is great if you live in a hard water area to prevent limescale on your glass but also it removes an incredible amounts of moisture as an experiment this morning I used our cottage window back to do exactly this and this is how much moisture was removed a staggering 200 milliliters of water that would otherwise have simply evaporated back into the air during the day with these simple steps we generally get no condensation on the mirror glass the entire room is generally dry within 10-15 minutes including the ceilings which is venting all that moisture from escaping elsewhere into the house so that's bathrooms taken care of elsewhere in the house wherever you can if you've got trick events try and keep them open during the winter it's not going to permanently flush and recycle the air like one of those home ventilation systems is going to but it's definitely gonna help to bring fresh less humid air into the house thereby diluting what's here already and if we take another look at that dewpoint graph we saw earlier you can see just how much drier the air outside is then the air is typically inside your home during winter months one final point before we move on let's have a quick chat about drying racks dry racks are obviously a bit of a disaster area when it comes to moisture in the house because all of that damp that in the clothes is basically being lifted out and deposited in the air which is going to have a very negative effect on the relative humidity levels inside your house now wherever you can you should obviously use a tumble dryer but I know this is difficult if you're in a rental property and you haven't got one or you can't afford the increased electricity bills that tumble drying will close admittedly has but just hold that thought and later on I'm going to be talking to you about dehumidifiers which are a really great product in way of giving you the ability to use drying racks whilst also extracting the moisture from the air that's caused so that's how lifestyle can impact on the humidity levels in your house let's now talk about dehumidifiers and positive improv ventilation systems so in our existing homes it's simply not practical let alone cost-effective for us to install all the ducting that will be required for one of these heat recovery systems we saw earlier but often the next best thing is perceived to be a positive input ventilation system as you can see here with these two new air systems four flats and houses with lofts the idea of this system is you install it in the loft in a central location and it pumps fresh air into the house via the loft space in order to try and circulate the air around your house so all these systems are great because they do away with all that ducting that you need with a proper heat recovery system that you and I just can't practically install in our old houses I do see a couple of problems with these units number one from the research I've done from the forums I've visited people say that in the absence of a proper heat recovery unit even with the 400 watt heater which after all only tempers the I coming into the house it does create very chilly spaces where the unit's located and your electricity bills could rise significantly reheating that space point too in my house I can't install one of these units because this corridor would be the obvious place to install it but unfortunately this is not loft above here it's the valley between two roofs and you're not meant to install them in the bathroom where I do have a loft because if somebody just had a shower all the units going to be doing is flushing that moist damp air all around the house but do let me know in the comment section below if you've had one of these in units installs whether you found that unmanageably chilly in the area where the unit's been installed but also whether you found it sorted out your condensation problems because I'm a little bit skeptical as to whether in the absence of all those extraction points fire or that ducting you saw in the heat recovery systems whether a small system like this PIV is going to be able to efficiently circulate the air well enough to prevent condensation occurring particularly given in a lot of our homes we're going to have doors shut which is going to provide a block for all of that air trying to circulate around but if you can't increase your ventilation it's not practical to leave your windows open the winter and you've got a heap of washing lying around drying all the time and are suffering from damp then this section is going to be of interest to you let's talk now about dehumidifiers and we'll quickly run through first the options that are available first up we've got small thermoelectric dehumidifiers followed by moisture absorbers like this arrow 360 small thermoelectric dehumidifiers of our very limited benefit can generally only cope with extremely small spaces like cupboards equally Moisture absorbers like these can only move very small amounts of water you may have seen a video done a couple of years ago on this system I bought five of these stupid things and they were absolutely hopeless in solving my condensation problems would stir when the Tablas fully dissolve you gotta buy a new set and you're left with this horrible blue slurry in the unit so these units are about as practical as a chocolate teapot but all is not lost there was some positivity out of me buying these because on the back of the video I did I got contacted by 'back a year ago to ask me if I was interested in trying out one of their dehumidifiers so if you're now thinking about buying a dehumidifier you've basically got two options you can either buy a desiccant dehumidifier or you can buy a compressor you're gonna have to decide whether a compressor or desiccant is most appropriate for your situation but here are the differences to help you make your decision so desiccant dehumidifiers work by drawing air over desiccant attached to a slowly rotating wheel the desiccant removes moisture from the air thereby drying it and then a separate heater heats up that desiccant in order to extract the moisture from it desiccant dehumidifiers on not temperature-dependent so you can use them in much cooler conditions and you can compressors they tend to be quieter but I stress that is on the low fan setting I've seen a lot of comments on Amazon purchases where people say on the - setting they are quite noisy and they're generally lighter and finally because a desiccant has to be heated to extract the moisture that perceived to be more expensive to run than compressors compressor or refrigerant dehumidifiers basically work like little fridges air is drawn over cold coils which are effectively below the dew point just like that window analogy I showed you earlier on and because of that analogy they have to operate in warmer conditions and desiccants typically in temperatures above three degrees they're generally lower energy consumption and as I'll come on to in a minute particularly with the e back in smart mode the operation is much more intelligent more sophisticated than the basic humid stat operation of a desiccant dehumidifier and price-wise is very little between them if you compare this miko desiccant with this 'back compressor on amazon now which dehumidifier you go for is a tricky decision but one would you need to get right because if you don't you'll end up either not solving the problem or you'll end up having much higher electricity bills I've got to confess I only have experience with the compressor dehumidifier which I'll come on to in a minute and I used to think desiccants were more for sort of disaster flood relief that sort of thing where you've got high volumes of water to remove when cost isn't really an issue but the miko that i showed you a minute ago has had pretty good reviews and clearly if you're operating this machine in very low temperatures unheated buildings like garages for example then the desiccant dehumidifiers the one for you because it's not temperature dependent the only issue i've got though is that desiccant dehumidifiers light nameko tend to have a very basic humid stat system in short you set the system to a fixed relative humidity value whether it's 40 50 percent and then the dehumidifier has to try and reduce the relative humidity to that level clearly light your bathroom extract a humid stat if you set it too high never switches on if you set it too low and it never switches off what concerns me is that dehumidifiers need to respond to both indoor and outdoor conditions in order to reach optimal operation optimum relative humidity varies from day to day and even during the day and every house will have its own optimum humidity level if you've got for example a desiccant dehumidifier set to low in Rh level and the danger is it'll start pulling moisture out of furniture walls windows floors and obviously that is both unnecessary and costly on your bills so when you're doing your research be wary of review sites like which which rate dehumidifiers according to how much water they extract rather than actually getting a handle on controlling the humidity in your home the 'back that I've been trialing for the last year or so has a smart control system and the idea is when you first set the unit up it runs in smart control mode for 24 to 48 hours basically monitoring humidity and taking data for that first period it then switches on and off automatically the most economical times to keep the humidity at the correct level if you want to increase the airflow you can run it in the max mode and in this mode you can set different time periods between two four and eight hours before it reverse back to the smart mode again there's also a laundry mode which again can be set for a certain amount of time remember we were talking about laundry earlier on if you've got a room that's difficult to ventilate where you've got all your laundry hanging stick this machine on laundry mode and it will suck all the water out of that laundry preventing it from circulating elsewhere around the house you can change the fan speed and you can also simply run the unit in air purifying mode and whilst the water container holds over two litres of water it can be bypassed with the drainage kit as indeed can the miko and this is a fantastic solution if you're a landlord worried about tenants being too lazy to empty the container or if you've got a property you don't visit very often so the suggestion is to place this unit in the coldest dampest part of the house or alternatively in a central location which is what I've done here since moisture Rises the first floor is preferable but you can hear the sound of it it's not particularly noisy it's the sound of a sort of small fridge but we were finding it a little bit noisy to have outside our bedroom door on the landing so I got seven thirty or fifty by evac a year ago now and I've been playing around with it ever since but it's only recently since I've understood the science of relative humidity and the significance of dew points that I've been able to make sense of the data I've collected let me tell you a little bit more I've done a lot of data gathering exercises over the last year but the most comprehensive have been over two two-week periods this Christmas 2019 using the thermo hygrometer every morning I've recorded the relative humidity downstairs the temperature inside relative humidity outside the temperature outside I've sucked all the condensation off the windows using the Karcher vacuum carefully measured what's left in the reservoir and I've entered the evac unit every morning again measuring the water extracted and what I found out has been quite interesting the first point as you'd expect is that the e back has been extracting consistently high volumes of water typically between one and a half litres and two litres a day although for reasons our monte that water extraction rate is not correlated to the condensation i've had on my windows the second point to make is that the relative humidity level in the cottage since we started the trial has been slowly decreasing as you'd expect as a smart control system started to do its work and the water extraction had an effect on the relative humidity and running consistently less than 50% where safely within the comfort zone so I don't have a relative humidity problem in this house which is a great achievement but I do have a persistent condensation problem as you've seen on both our single glazed windows and all say in the corners of our double glazed windows initially I was really confused and disappointed by this but I've since realized that we're like here you've got single glazed windows there is very little you can do even when you've got consistently low RH values around the house there's very little you can do to stop the relative humidity close to the glass from reaching dew points and what come on to a couple of steps you can take shortly so the one thing you can be sure of which is obviously no surprise is that the outdoor temperature is directly related to the condensation on our windows just look what happened to the condensation on day 5 when the temperature outside dropped to two and a half degrees Celsius and on days 30 and 14 & 15 where it was near freezing and this is not a failure of the dehumidifier again it's down to that pesky dew point on day for taking all factors into consideration the dew point was approximately 8 degrees Celsius so with an outdoor temperature of 8.3 there was very little condensation on day 5 however the outdoor temperature plummeted to two and a half degrees and with a dew point again of around 8 degrees Celsius it's no surprise we had 175 millilitres of condensation so clearly installing double glazed windows is gonna help and no end with your condensation issues but it's not all bad news if you've got single glazed windows like I have it dawned on me during this trial that the whole reason why heat exchange systems P IVs are so good is because they thrive on sir creating the air around your home and of course when you go to bed at night and shut your cones you're denying any circulation in that space between the curtains and the window so of course even with plenty of heating in the house and low relative humidity levels like I've got we're not giving our windows any chance to stay free of condensation with the curtains shut because what we're doing is we're denying the chance for that drier warmer air to keep flushing over the window surface to prevent the relative humidity rising to dew point and to illustrate this on a couple of evenings like for example day 15 of the trial and left the curtains open and the effect was dramatic condensation plummeted from 210 milliliters to zero overnight and just to finally illustrate the point this morning final day of filming 3.6 degrees outside an insignificant amount of conversation on this window where we had the blinds open all night and then on the same wall just a few feet away where our bays curtain shut all night loads of condensation now that's probably not exactly what you wants to hear as it's not particularly practical advice to say leave your curtains open particularly with privacy issues and also trying to keep warm at night but I hope that gives you a bit more of an insight into why the condensation is forming so that it gives you some ideas and maybe a bit of a strategy as to how you can fix your problems so what about the second two-week trial when I have this 'back dehumidifier switched off and weirdly the relative humidity levels stayed stubbornly low as did a lot of the other data the honest answer is I don't know why this should be the case but I think in conclusion I've got a pretty well ventilated house with leaking windows but also the lifestyle measures that we put in place as described earlier on in the video to keep condensation to keep moisture down however there are other factors at play as well we've got a brick and dirt floor immediately below this carpet I've got a basement that's not properly insulated so this has not been the perfect trial for this unit where typically you want a better sealed space for it to operate at maximum efficiency so the third header in my solutions list was insulation and I will just quickly mention that because it fits in with everything we've been discussing we have insulated now most of the upstairs room in our house to really good effect with insulator that plasterboard and what that has done is it's warmed up the wall it stopped it getting to that dew point that we discussed earlier and as a consequence walls that used to have a lot of mold in them no longer do however I would say to you I would urge you to think of insulation as part of your moisture reduction strategy rather than the answer to it you need to tackle those relative humidity levels get them down first and maybe see the insulation as an additional measure to make your house easier to heat because if you just do the insulation you're potentially masking the problem applying a sticking-plaster to it rather than resolving it so that's it for today I've gone for far too long over 24 minutes I'm sorry about that I was just wanting to make the video as comprehensive as possible for you and I hope it's given you some good ideas as to hugging to resolve your problems get yourself one of these it's an absolute lifesaver where you have got condensation you can't sort out I'll put post links to that as well as everything else in the description at the end of the video which don't forget on your smartphone you can access by clicking on the little arrow and on your computer by clicking the show more button if you liked today's video do please click on the like button below and if you're new to my channel it means so much to me if you were to subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here thanks and see you soon

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 497,168

Rating: 4.9129224 out of 5

Keywords: how to, stop condensation, stop mould growing, condensation on windows, bathroom mold, bathroom mould, how to cure condensation, condensation on glass, stop mould growing on windows, stop mould growing on walls, condensation on windows during winter, condensation on windows in winter, condensation on windows in the morning, condensation on windows how to prevent, how to cure condensation on windows, ebac 3850e, meaco dd8l, charlie diyte, damp, how to cure damp

Id: TIDb-pdOnXM

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020