Yes616

DTVuser2009

Rain or should i say monsoons and extreme humidity. i may have to invest in a dehumidifier since my home's indoor humidity with A/C on constantly is at 80-90% and mold is on the walls. the home doesn't leak but it sure gets moisture from somewhere.

Not too long ago i saw three red-eyed tree frogs. they aren't native to kentucky from what i know; they're rainforest animals. but we've had the rains and humidity of one so i'm not surprised, one of those three was on my window clinging on with its tiny sticky 'fingers'.

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Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?!

Jay

but it's a dry heat.

Surprisingly we've had a very cool year so far. In fact, this past June has been one of the coolest Summer months we've seen in a long time. July has been fair with a few 114 degree days but I think our average for the month is a little lower than usual.

We've also had a few nasty Monsoon storms this month too. They are a sight to behold...

(video by Ishrafael)

+ YouTube Video

Piggie

Hot in North Central Florida (I don't live in the panhandle but 80 miles north of Orlando).

Since the middle of June it's been like August days. 95 by 2:30 has been the norm. Normally we don't see much above 90 until this time of year but it started 6 weeks ago.

My vegie crops had a very hard time in June and early July when it's not normally 95 degrees. It really hurt a lot of my plants that probably thought it was August and time to stop producing.

Rain comes and goes, but that is normal for FL. We go 2 weeks without enough rain to count then days of constant rain. I can't say that isn't really normal for here. But a lot of summers we get the daily afternoon thunderstorm, but not this year. Feast or famine as far as rain.

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I found a solution to dehumidifying my house. If the outside temp drops below 82 or so the central AC unit doesn't run much. This only happens during the days in a row when it rains all day. The humidity would go way up unless I ran the AC way too cold (read that dollars).

I have a tiny 5000 BTU unit in my bedroom. We normally just use it at night and turn the main unit up a couple degrees at night. That keeps the big unit from coming on much if at all as it doesn't pay either to let the house heat up too much. Plus with the tiny unit I can sleep at 70 degrees which is nice as I run the main unit at 81 degrees.

So I thought one the second day a week of constant rain, why not run the little unit all day? It worked. It's so small it' makes almost no difference cooling the house but it sucks a ton of water out of the air, because it runs nearly constant with the bedroom door open and turned up on max cool.

I have played with it and if the temp outside gets over 85, the main unit runs enough it's a waste of electricity to run the little unit in the day. But below that on damp days (all we ever have in the summer) it pullls out the humidity. Then it double for a comfortable low cost AC for sleeping at night.

since I started cutting off the big AC at night I have seen a drop in the electic bill from last year that wasn't even as hot as this summer. It's only about 4 KWH a day, but that helps.

Did the math. The bedroom AC runs about 50% duty cycle with the door closed. It pulls 0.55KWH per hour of operation. So it runs about 5 hours a night (to add an hour to cool down). That is 2.75 KWH per night.

The big unit pulls 3.6 KWH per hour of operation. The main unit before ran about 2 hours a night total. For about 7.2 KWH for the night. So you can see there the approx 4 KWH per day I am saving.

That works out to be about double what I saved switching all the lights here to fluorescent and lower energy bulbs.

So for an $89 device (less than most dehumidifiers) it is a dual purpose unit.

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The more I understand, the less I know.

1inxs

I'm in the high desert Uinta mountains in Utah. It's been wetter than normal. Actually we've received record rain this year and temperatures are cooler than normal. It's got to be global warming!

DTVuser2009

$89?! here the 5KBTU units are about $189, more than the price of the smallest dehumidifier, which is normally ~ $149-169.

I guess i'll have to look around in the secondhand shops, although the presence of a A/C unit is kinda nonexistant this time. last summer there were about 3 per week.

Also window units are kinda hard when you live in the kind of mobile home where the windows are 'louvered' meaning that unless it's a HUGE unit (as in over 220V) it won't fit the window, or it will fit but put too much pressure on the top louver and break the glass. nice thought though

Not Global warming but Global Cooling. the politicians have it backwards. otherwise we'd not be cooling but getting hotter and hotter. as in El Nino. remember when you heard people shout that one? LOL!

In fact the only place it seems to truly be warming above-average is in the North Pole. that's why you are hearing all the bleeding heart polar bear stuff on the TV lately. but that's Polar Warming, not Global Warming since it's confined to the pole(s)

But from what i read online from viable sources (not forums) here's the issue:

1. The Average Global Temperature has not changed significantly to cause either

2. Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant!!! (it's a necessary trace element of Earth. without that the plants die, then the herbivores die, then we die. we should want more, not less) Carbon Monoxide, however, is the dangerous gas that's deadly and is a byproduct of vehicle combustion among other sources (plants, coal, etc) but politicians have that one constantly confused with Carbon Dioxide.

3. Even if there is a Global Cooling/Heating cycle, there's nothing humans can do to stop it; nor can they cause it. it's natural part of Earth's lifetime and we'll just have to sit and watch the show. it's happened more than once before we have existed. and may very well be linked to the destruction of the dinosaurs (the comet theory is being debated)

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Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?!

Piggie

I looked online and found mine for $109 and another one for $99. But I did the same last year and got to the store and they were on sale. Toward the end of the year and begining they put the on sale in the store and don't put that up on the web from what I have found.

The problem I have found with dehumidifiers. Almost all of them are basically air conditioners or more generally heat pumps. They use freon or some refrigerant to cool a coil that pulls the water out of the air by passing it over the coil, then another coil where they remove heat from the system by passing air over a hot coil.

Now to me trouble is both the hot and cold coils are inside the conditioned space (ie the house). So every since bit of electricity the unit pulls is transferred into heat which the main air conditioner then has to remove from the house.

By using a very small window A/C the heat is pushed outside the house and the cooling coils are inside the house.

Now if you lived somewhere humid in the winter, a dehumidifier would warm the house as well.

In my opinion this is one of those things the green people missed. Probably because they don't consider any freon based electrically driven device to be green.

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PS: I won't touch the rest of your post with a ten foot pole.

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The more I understand, the less I know.

DTVuser2009

Yeah i thought R-134a was the 'friendly' freon? lol!

I had to succumb to my old HUGE 220V A/C unit for the window idea (10,000+ BTU) and i had one joy of a time figuring out how to wire 220V low amp. two hots, from SEPARATE sources, and a ground. wow. either way it seems to work. i only needed the fan last night but even that was much nicer than a sticky interior.

Lucky for me the thing fit with all the louvers removed. i was afraid the top would be supported by the last upper glass one. that wouldn't have worked. but height wise it fit perfectly. now all i have to do is make the sides look better. i walled the rest of the window in fake wood grain which matches the wall inside so you'd never know a window existed but outside there's nothing to keep rain/bugs/etc out. but i only had a short time and little patience. i hate high humidity.

Either way thanks for the idea.

__________________
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?!