Do HVAC Units Reduce Humidity?

Do HVAC Units Reduce Humidity?

September 7, 2018

Living in Tampa, or the rest of Florida for that matter, means we’ve got to deal not only with year-round heat, but we’re stuck with plenty of humidity to boot. Although to be fair, it’s not all bad. The beaches make up for that, as does never having to worry about shoveling snow off of our driveways three times a day.

That said, humidity is still aggravating and a pain to get away from. Sure, we can go inside, seal all the windows and doors and blast the AC as high as it will go for hours on end, but even that has its drawbacks. For starters, when we do that, we can count on the power bill being astronomically high. We also don’t know for sure whether cranking the AC will get rid of the humidity!

It should, though, shouldn’t it? After all, it only makes sense for a wave of cool air to blow the heavy moisture right out of your home — but it doesn’t work exactly how we’d think. Follow along and Acree Plumbing, Air & Electric will help explain why it doesn’t!

Getting the Lay of the Land

To understand how humidity affects an air conditioner, it helps to know how an air conditioner works in the first place. You flip a switch or press a button, and cool air comes out. Simple enough.

But that happens when warm air is drawn in and passed over cooling elements in the HVAC system, which is then expelled back out through the vents and into your home. When the air is simply warm and dry, the AC has no problem taking all of that in and doing what needs to be done to it.

When you add in air that is saturated with a lot of moisture, though, the AC’s job becomes much more strenuous and difficult.

Why It Doesn’t Help – All That Much

You see, an AC does reduce humidity to a certain degree. When it’s sucking all that warm air up, some of the humidity is naturally going to be removed, but it’ll only do so for a certain amount of time.

Once the humidity level reaches a certain point, the AC has to perform two duties at a high level for longer than it was intended to. That puts a strain on it, and it’ll make the unit work overtime to try and accommodate the extremely moisture-filled water. Before long, it’ll be working like mad to get rid of humidity — and it will fail.

That’s why so many people invest in dehumidifiers. These appliances take that strain off of your AC and do all the moisture removal for it, leaving the air-cooling part of the job to the unit that is best at it. So while your AC can help with the humidity problem in your home, we wouldn’t recommend relying on it.

Acree Plumbing, Air & Electric can help you solve that problem once and for all. We’re proud to offer a variety of dehumidifying solutions, and we can make sure your AC unit is running in tip-top shape as well. Give us a call at 800-937-6736 and we’ll work with you to come up with a comprehensive humidity blueprint!

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