And Then I Dehumidified….

The weekend was spent researching condensation and the control thereof. I kind of knew what the answer would be but after all these years I needed to check there were no new, ridiculously simple, cheap answers out there. Something like, ‘Putting a seagull feather, wrapped in a pair of old cotton ‘Y’ fronts, in a centrally located bottom draw will completely eradicate condensation and all risk of mould’, sort of thing. Sadly, but not surprisingly, nothing.

As I expected, the condensation solver{?} is ventilation. I honestly can’t see the percentage in heating the house only to then let it out just to stop wiping watery windows.

Since being here, I have spent the past few winters tracing and stopping all draught and air leaking areas, as you do. Something like; Me to keep the warm side inside, for to keep the cold side outside. That’s why I filled the cracks in, inside, loaded the loft with fluffy stuff, deep stuff. Me to make an air-tight box, right? Haay! Hi-ya Watha, how ya’ doin’?

The other suggestion, from all around the Web-a-Net, was the use of a dehumidifier. This led to further research through Sunday and, as a by-the-by, kept me amused as ‘her indoors’ attempted to add two new words to her English vocabulary, ‘condensation’ and ‘dehumidifier’.

Part of the dehumidifier, or ‘machine’ as ‘her indoors’ settled for, research obviously entailed checking out the green credentials of the dozens of units on offer. To give you some idea of the time spent laboriously checking this out to find the perfect green machine, try this simple comparison experiment. Close your eyes tight shut and count from one to two really, really fast.

Monday morning, crack of cock crow, after choosing the machine and reserving on ol’ Mr. Webby, it’s excitedly off to collect the machine. Excited? For my younger reader, you’ll be surprised at the simple little things that cause excitement as you get older.

Home; remove machine from box, put box to one side for playing in later, back to box to check for instructions. No instructions. Never mind, lets go! Check water tank is in place, find instructions in water tank, read and stop everything. He must stand up-right for two hours for the fiddly, electrickery bits to re-set after transit and before operation.

He is now upstairs, happily humming away and at the time of posting this post via the posting program, has been running for about four hours and, surprisingly and scarily, collected three litres of water.

What can I say? I’ll say what I can say later after the initial ‘drying out period’, suggested to be about two weeks, has completed and he, hopefully, switches to automatic moisture control.

Later, ‘her indoors’ asked what I was thinking about. She knows that look of mine.
”What? Oh, just wondering if I could pipe the water from the machine to the coffee maker, is all.”
I could tell she thought that was a crazy idea. I know that look of hers.

While doing my ‘blink of an eye’ greenery research I ran into this little bit of stuff. You think I’m tempted with this? You think I could be fooled by this? Come on, ‘course not. But, all the same………

Quote; Larry Wall.

“The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”