7 ms·
I wonder how they control humidity inside the home and prevent mildew/mould? The air in the greenhouse would be very humid all year round I would have thought?
by gavia1 7y ago
I wonder how they control humidity inside the home and prevent mildew/mould? The air in the greenhouse would be very humid all year round I would have thought?
- Brakenshire 7y agoI think heat exchange air ventilation systems are quite common in Northern Europe. Presumably you could just keep the windows of the inner house closed most of the time, and then have a ventilation coming from outside through the heat exchanger.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DoreenMichele 7y agoWhy would it be humid? Heat doesn't cause humidity. Deserts can be hot and dry. (Edited are to can be for the pedantic people.)
- crazygringo 7y agoPlants/watering cause humidity and the glass traps it. And although I guess they probably could, people aren't generally maintaining desert ecosystems in their greenhouses.
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoThis is not a problem in the winter -- outside air (if brought up to room temperature) is extremely dry. So just a bit of air exchange would dry out any jungle if humidity is not supplemented.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoNot much grows in a dry desert though, to grow stuff you need water. Even if you weren't growing stuff then you'd still have the soil as an access point for moisture and get excess evaporation because of the greenhouse heat.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoDepends on the desert. Here are pics of Saguaro National Park: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=saguaro+national+park&qs=CustomSearch&pq=saguar&sc=8-6&cvid=EF399640A05F4DEA9CBCE1CA2B9CF792&sp=2&form=QBIR https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=saguaro+national+park&q... Desert plants are adapted to low rainfall. That doesn't mean all deserts are just barren rock and sand.
- hprotagonist 7y agosaguaro national park has really grown on me. It’s a surprisingly and eerily beautiful place.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoYes, and when the rain comes they burst forth with vibrant life .. hence the specifiers "dry" & "not much". I guess if they plan to eat agave and saguaro they'll have less humidity issues?
- btbuildem 7y agoI think standard household activity would generate a lot of humidity. Usually dwellings vent outside, but here the outside is in a larger "inside". I'm guessing the greenhouse has its own air regulation set up.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoYes, this is possibly true, depending on the details of their lifestyle. On the other hand, the article talks about their use of composting toilets, recycling water, etc. So they may well not be engaging in the same high levels of water consumption as typical modern families in developed countries. So I remain unconvinced that a warmer environment automatically and without exception translates to high humidity and mold. (I will confess to being born and raised in the state of Georgia. So my idea of hot and humid is perhaps more extreme than average.) Edit: If you've never lived in dramatically different living arrangements, you may not realize how much lifestyle choices impact details like heat and humidity. While getting divorced, my sons and I spent a year sharing a single bedroom at a relative's home. We eventually found that removing all cardboard from all food products not only dropped the temperature by 5 degrees Fahrenheit, it put a stop to roaches being attracted to our room. Prior to that discovery, our room was frequently too hot and humid. Afterwards, it was vastly more comfortable. We were shocked by the difference. We initially wondered if we were imagining things, but the room had a thermometer in the window. It consistently made a 5 degree difference.
- eesmith 7y agoI think you've been here long enough to know that a phrase like "automatically and without exception" is likely a poor interpretation of what the parent poster meant with "standard household activity". I was born and raised in Florida. In Miami I lived in a 1950s house designed w/o A/C and with effectively no insulation. In Tallahassee I lived in a 1970s house designed for A/C. But we didn't have money, so we didn't run the A/C unless it was nasty hot. The differences were remarkable. For the same temperature and humidity, the Miami house was much more comfortable. The vernacular architecture of high ceilings, open crawlspace, and massive amounts of windows meant there was still cooling with any sort of breeze. With the Tallahassee home, the building was designed to insulate, to keep the A/C power bills low. The windows were small, there wasn't much cross-breeze even with all the windows open. A/C systems include dehumidifiers, and the building has a vapor barrier to prevent the high outside humidity from coming in. But w/o the A/C's dehumidifier, standard household activity like breathing, cooking, and showering raise the inside humidity more than the outside, with a slow rate of equilibriation. We finally kicked on the A/C when, among other things, yes, mold started to form. Of course 'lifestyle choices impact details like heat and humidity'. So does architecture, as I just pointed out. But btbuildem said 'standard' and 'usually'.
- theli0nheart 7y agoDeserts aren’t necessarily hot, they just have very little water.
- ryan_j_naughton 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_desert
- Simon_says 7y agoThey have little precipitation. There's plenty of ice in the Antarctic.
- theli0nheart 7y agoAre you sure about that? A river delta could be completely lush without any precipitation, but I don’t think that’d be a desert.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoFrom the link someone else already provided: Most polar deserts are covered in ice sheets, ice fields, or ice caps. (I'm getting a chuckle out of the multiple layers of pedantry here.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bagacrap 7y agoNile delta is in a desert (4-8" rain/yr), so yes.
- DINKDINK 7y ago>Why would it be humid? The hotter air is, the higher its capacity to hold water vapor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychrometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PsychrometricChart.SeaLevel.SI.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PsychrometricChart.SeaLev...
- petschge 7y agoWhich actually drop relative humidity, because water does not magically appear.
- ptaipale 7y agoYes, but the absolute humidity is the amount of water in air, and particularly n cold climates, this water load can cause considerable trouble in structures. The correct way to design airflows and location of dew point inside the walls etc can be considerable trouble; ad hoc design tends to lead to mildew problems.
- z3t4 7y agoDry cold air gets in during the winter, it expands and the RH goes down, warm humid air escapes, more dry cold air gets in, creating an extremely dry environment. Still you can get mold because of condensation when warm air meets cold rooftop.
- krzyk 7y agoBut greenhouses are humid. Deserts aren't covered in a dome and the dome blocks water from evaporating like in the deserts.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- war1025 7y agoI am a little confused about this fear people have of mold and mildew in their houses. Up until very recently people's houses weren't far off from the outside environment. Generally in the summer the best they did was keep the rain out and provide some shade. Houses weren't uninhabitable mold pits back then, why would they be now?
- AngryData 7y agoThere is some additional risk with modern homes being much better sealed than old homes which always had some air moving through it. If you don't have a proper HVAC system and use like electric heaters instead of forced air, humidity levels can build up and slowly absorb into materials if you don't have enough airflow, and you likely won't notice, unless maybe the dew point gets high enough that all of a sudden every surface in your house is damp. It is less of a concern in places without high humidity but some swampy areas can be 90% humidity for weeks or months at a time and then all of a sudden you got mold behind your walls because some idiot decided to seal up every seam with plastic or glue or whatever other impermeable material. Part of this is a misunderstanding of building techniques that block airflow, ive seen numerous houses with all the roof vents plugged up to "save heat", walls with plastic sheeting on the inside wall creating air/moisture traps, or people replacing air-permeable house wrap with solid sheet plastic, foam and glue on every board and seam with a sealed up and moist crawl space underneath, ect. It is fairly easy to get mold in a humid place with a sealed home and no forced air, and nearly impossible to kill it all without tearing out all the drywall in the house. If everything was done right, shouldn't be a problem, but people are far more likely to pay for size and speed over quality materials or careful quality labor.
- fhsm 7y agoHere’s an accessible and illustrated page with some additional details around your point https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/interior-projects/how-to/a149/1275121/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/interior-projects/how-... I’ve seen this turn into a problem with big renovation of old residential structures twice. My personal takeaway was make sure your envelope and HVAC are of roughly equivalent quality and era.
- alex_duf 7y agoI suspect noise level might be quite high too, especially with children. Still a cool house though, I like their water treatment
- Too 7y agoThe walls of a normal modern insulated house are already completely air tight, first layer behind the walls seen from the inside is a plastic sheet to prevent humidity from indoor human activities to get into the insulation. After building a new house they literally try to inflate it like a balloon and measure the pressure to ensure there is no leakage. Controlling humidity and air freshness is done through vents, usually combined with a heat exchange to not let out all the warm air you just heated up. Condensation accumulating larger drops might be a bigger issue with glass though, but only if it's already humid on the inside.
- dagss 7y agoI could be wrong but I think mould appears when humidity condenses to water drops. So you need both humidity and a temperature contrast (e.g., hot inside air meets a cold wall). So as long as the inside and outside of the house has the same temperature, condensation in random spots should not happen?.. Condensation will be on the glass panels, where mould cannot grow.