Dampness and humidity in your property can have many different impacts on your home and your life. The most obvious side effects are damage to your home and potential health concerns. What most people don’t realize is that dampness can increase your energy bills.
Damp Air is Hard to Process
Whatever the cause of dampness and humidity in your home, an increase in energy bills is inevitable to some degree. This is mostly to do with how humid air reacts to the process of being heated or cooled. Humid air is actually harder to condition than arid air and is harder to regulate in a consistent manner.
This means your HVAC system has to work harder to provide you with the results that you are used to. Even then, it will most likely be inconsistent, leading you to turn the heat up or down further than you usually would. This will directly cause your energy consumption to increase and will lead to an uptick in your energy costs.
Inefficient Appliances Contribute
It is important to remember, however, that your energy costs could also be increasing because of the factors that are causing both dampness and humidity. Damaged or inefficient appliances (for example, leaking water heaters or a damaged sump pump) could increase levels of dampness and humidity in your home as well as drawing more energy from your home. This would essentially cause energy bills to rise.
This is not always caused by damage to an appliance, of course. Age can also be a factor. Older water heaters, sump pumps, and HVAC systems are less energy-efficient than newer models as a rule of thumb. As they age, their power consumption is likely to increase as a result of wear and tear and a general decrease in efficiency.