What Are the Sources of Condensation in a Home

What Are the Sources of Condensation in a Home

By Ruth MacEachern

Product Manager

Condensation in your home is a sign that the humidity levels are too high. Depending on the temperature, air can contain a significant amount of water vapour, but when it gets cooler – particularly during the night – that water vapour is released onto cold surfaces such as windows and walls where it forms as droplets of condensation. Over time, if condensation is not dealt with, it can cause more serious problems with mould and damp that can be expensive to resolve and potentially damaging to your health.

Understanding the sources of humidity in your home lets you take steps to reduce them and stop condensation. Here are the most common sources of condensation and what you can do to reduce them:

Cooking and boiling

When you cook or boil water for cooking on the stove steam is released into the air and can build up. By using lids on your pans when cooking, you reduce the amount of steam that can escape and use less energy to cook food. To remove the excess steam, ensure that you also use an extractor fan and keep the kitchen door closed while cooking to prevent steam escaping into the rest of your home where it will quickly condense away from the heat.

Drying clothes indoors

Drying clothes indoors can be one of the biggest sources of condensation – particularly if you use radiators. A wet towel can contain as much as a litre of water that will evaporate into the air while drying. If you don’t have an alternative to drying clothes indoors, ensure that you keep a window open and the door to the room closed.

Inadequate heating

Cold air holds less moisture – in fact for every 11C difference in temperature, the capacity of the air to hold moisture falls by around 50%. Maintaining a constant temperature throughout your home helps to keep humidity at a comfortable level, and reduces the difference in temperature at night, which means less condensation will form.

Bathing and showering

Hot showers and baths create steam, which can lead to condensation. One way to reduce the amount of steam from a bath is to start filling it with cold water and then bringing it up to temperature with hot water rather than the other way around which releases more steam into the air. Ensure that your bathroom extractor fan is clean and working properly to remove steam before it has a chance to form into condensation and keep the bathroom doors closed to stop steam escaping into the rest of your home.

Breathing

Every time you exhale – and on average people breathe more than 20,000 times – we release a small amount of water vapour. During the night, when temperatures are lower and the bedroom door is closed, the humidity level can build up quickly and respiration released water vapour is one of the biggest contributors to the condensation you see on your windows in the morning. Sleeping with the windows slightly open can help air to circulate more effectively and reduce the amount of condensation you see in the morning.

Poor ventilation

The main reason humidity builds up in a home is poor ventilation. If air is not circulating properly and being replenished from outdoors, it can become saturated and stale. Having extractor fans in bathrooms, kitchens and other wet rooms is important, but if you find condensation away from an obvious source of moisture, whole house ventilation using a system such as PIV (Positive Input Ventilation) may be more appropriate. PIV systems such as EnviroVent ATMOS work by drawing fresh air into your home at roof level and then dispersing this gently throughout your home to replace the stale air and reduce humidity. They are highly efficient in use and help to reduce temperature differences between rooms which can improve your energy usage.

Find out more

If your home has a condensation problem, we can help. Book a free home survey from one of our local ventilation specialists. They will visit your home to identify the causes of condensation and provide you with advice about the best way to deal with them. Simply enter your postcode below to find an expert near you.