How to prevent condensation and mould creation on walls at your home?

By the time you’re reading this you have probably joined a growing club of people suffering from mold and condensation.
Before we start, consider a typical stain created by a roof leak. This will help distinguish between a roof leak and a condensation stain. The stain will be of light brown color, almost as if tea had been spilled on the ceiling. On the other side, consider a stain caused by condensation. If your stains look like the image below, it is almost certainly condensation.

Black mold lurks over baseboards, behind beds and furniture such as cupboards, in bathrooms, on the joints between ceilings and walls, especially on outside walls, also behind cupboards and of course on window frames and window frames.
Now that we know what mold is, what it looks like, and where to find it, let’s try to get rid of it.

First of all, we need to understand what is causing the condensation. Condensation is caused by moisture in the air, e.g. For example, laundry drying on or near a radiator: The heat from the radiator dries wet clothing, and this moisture evaporates into the air. When this moisture hits a cold surface, it reaches the dew point and turns back into water. Often you come home in the evening and cook with the pot lids off, hot baths in showers have a lot of potential for steam and the windows are not open or only open for a short time. The old favorite in winter is drying clothes indoors, which can create a lot of condensation. Multiply all of that by the number of people living in your home, and let’s imagine all those invisible droplets of moisture hanging in the air. Of course we can’t see them, but if we could it would look a little like millions of tiny bubbles looking for a cold surface to land on and when they do they turn back to water and become visible. Then this moist environment is perfect for multi-growth. Just like over the baseboards, in this bathroom and on this bedroom ceiling.

Now that we know what we are dealing with, we will use a two-step process.
First, reducing sources of humidity, and that in itself, should help most of you either cure your problems or reduce them seriously.
Second, we are going to look at a simple and inexpensive solution to get rid of the remaining unwanted humidity in the house with the help of a dehumidifier.

You need to cut down on sources of moisture wherever possible and here’s how:
1. Try not to dry the laundry in the apartment
2. Use a tumble dryer to dry clothes and make sure the hood blows the moist air outside or use a condenser to catch the water for you. A good dehumidifier can be used to dry clothes indoors.
3. Always put a lid on your pans when cooking. This not only saves humidity, but also cooks your food faster and saves energy. Don’t forget to close all doors to prevent steam from getting into the rest of the house. Use an externally ventilated extractor hood above the stove.
4. Always use an extractor hood when showering or bathing, and it can be worth investing in a high-performance hood as it is far better. You can even get extractor hoods with built-in moisture sensors. You can search for this on Google using the term “high flow extractor fan”. If that is not possible, then open the window and leave it open to allow air movement, unless it is the winter months when the outside air is also humid.

A good rule of thumb is that if you can’t dry your laundry outside, close the windows because there’s no point in letting moist air back into the house. Of course, you can’t stop breathing, but since breathing can add four cups of water per day over the expelled breath per person, it is worth opening your windows again at night. Only do this when it’s not humid outside, otherwise you let the humid air in.

If you followed these steps, you have done some serious work in lowering humidity at your home. Unfortunately, most climates get humid in the winter months. That said, in Switzerland, from mid-October to mid-March there is probably no point in opening a window as the air outside is humid and letting it in while having these problems, is not a good idea.

If you want to go a step further, a dehumidifier is your best friend. A good little dehumidifier can remove up to a few liters of water from the air per day, and the benefits are drier air and warmer walls, which means your home is better insulated, resulting in lower energy bills and less humidity.