For those of you that have humidity sensors around the house, I’m curious what the difference in humidity values are for different parts of your house.
The reason I’m asking is because our main bathroom is always consistently 10-15 higher than our living room even when no one is at home. It can even get up to 20+ higher when it’s really humid outside or raining/just rained. This sets off our shower vent fan as I have an automation that kicks it on when the difference is 20+ and turns off if the diff is <= 15 and stays so for 5 minutes.
I wonder if this indicates we have a seal problem somewhere. We did just get a new skylight installed (replaced by insurance company from hail damage). Unfortunately, we haven’t lived here long enough to say if this difference in humidity is normal BUT while we were remodeling the bathroom, we did find some termite damage which makes me think twice
One thing you could do is move the sensors around to see if the humidity moves with the sensors, or stays the same. Or, put them all in one room and see if they all agree.
This is a graph of all the sensors I have over a 24H period, pretty typical. When we take a shower the bathroom sensor will jump up significantly of coarse. Looking at the right of the graph, the lowest is the Ecobee thermostat in the hall and then next one up is a sensor under the sink in the kitchen. It's a leak sensor for the dishwasher but does humidity as well. The next two are the bathrooms and the one over them all is the outside humidity. The bathrooms run higher here as well. We also keep our bathrooms closed off, which does make them run higher during the day when it gets warmer. So like you the exhaust fans will kick on to try and bring it down.
It can also be a big difference in my experience as well, but I quite likely (actually, almost definitely) am not sealed appropriately from the outside humid air....
Note, I only changed the battery in the mater bedroom earlier today... And I am just about to have a shower And I have been running two dehumidifiers...
It has also been quite overcast, rainy and humid here today:
I'm sure designs can vary... But I know when I got mine replaced in the living area (also due to hail damage), the installer explained that the cover on the underside of the ceiling could not be air-tight and had a small gap around the circular cover so any heat inside the tube up to the roof could vent. Not sure if that is of any significance or relevant for you....
It's a good thing that you able to monitor the humidity and already conscious of it's potential impacts.... but I would suggest having regular inspections, just to make sure, or even some kind of treatment to try and avoid them returning.
Ahhh how did you get this chart of your values?!?! I need this. I’d just been eyeballing the values
You may be correct on the skylight! I just realize I hadn’t properly calibrated the sensors with the salt test anyway, so I’m going to do that just to make sure my numbers are somewhat accurate.
And I have been running two dehumidifiers...
