Humidity, Mold, and Your Basement
If you’ve ever walked into your basement and experienced...a smell...then you may have started looking into dehumidifiers. They’re easily available, but not every dehumidifier is created equal. Let’s go over the why, the how, and the what of dehumidifiers and help you make the best choice for your home.
Why: Basements and crawl spaces commonly have humidity problems because moisture seeps in through the foundation walls, causing ambient moisture levels to rise. Even if you don’t have standing water, you can still have issues with humidity.
All mold needs in order to grow and thrive is moisture and a food source. This is why you often see mold growth on the ceiling beams (wood), fiberglass insulation (paper backing) or even your cardboard boxes. Or maybe you don’t see it at all, but you certainly smell it. Mold is microscopic, so by the time you can see it growing in your basement, what you’re looking at is entirely colonies of thousands of spores. (It’s ok if you need to stop reading for a minute and go shower now).
In addition to the smell, there are multiple reasons you don’t want mold in your home. First, it can endanger the structural integrity of your foundation. As mold eats away at support beams, they can splinter and break, making the floor above unsafe to walk on. Second, mold is known to cause or exacerbate multiple health conditions - everything from causing upper respiratory illness to exacerbating allergies and asthma - it can literally jeopardize your health.
How: Here’s the annoying thing about mold.
It’s persistent.
You can’t really “kill” it, per se, no matter how many articles about bleach and scrubbing you’ve seen on Facebook. The only way to really eradicate it is to render it dormant by creating an inhospitable environment. And since you can’t remove a food source without, well, tearing down and rebuilding your home with inorganic materials, you have to attack the moisture.
By reducing humidity/ambient moisture, mold has lost one of the two things it needs in order to function, and so it will stop spreading. In addition to preventing the destruction of support beams and belongings, rendering the mold dormant will also help eliminate the musty smell.
What: As I said above, not all dehumidifiers are created equal. And despite the focus of this blog, they aren’t exclusively for basements, either. I have a small tabletop dehumidifier in my bathroom to help the ventilation system post-shower. But that’s a small room, and only situationally humid - a basement or crawl space that spans the house needs something a little more powerful.
That’s where the SaniDry system comes in. The SaniDry Sedona provides powerful dehumidification in a small package, removing up to 95 pints of water a day and self draining into a sump pump or other discharge system. That means no visits downstairs to empty it, or worry that it isn’t keeping up. And did I mention it’s EnergyStar certified? No crazy energy bills here.
Sure, you can put any dehumidifier anywhere and expect it to remove some water from the air, but why settle for “some” of a solution? Call and ask about the SaniDry Sedona and dry out your home for good.
