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A Solution to Sogginess
Are your shoes turning green in the closet? Do the sheets feel clammy when you crawl into bed a night? You can suffer with Lima's humid climate or you can make your life more comfortable by getting a dehumidifier.
A dehumidifier removes moisture from the air. The usual technique used to remove the moisture is to condense the moisture onto a cold surface.
 Anyone who has poured a cold glass of iced tea on a hot, humid summer day knows that moisture will condense on the glass. When air cools, it loses its ability to hold moisture; in the case of the cold glass, the moisture in the air condenses right onto the glass. If the glass is left on a table long enough and if the air is very humid, a significant puddle of water can form. You may have noticed the same phenomenon in any air conditioner. The moisture in the air inside the room condenses onto the air conditioner's cold coils. If it's a window unit, the water drips out the back of the unit onto the ground.
A dehumidifier is simply an air conditioner that has both its hot and cold coils in the same box. A fan draws the room's air over the cold coil of the air conditioner to condense the moisture (which normally drips into a bucket). The dry air then passes through the hot coil to heat it back up to its original temperature. That's all there is to it!
If you have a room that is air conditioned, it should not need a dehumidifier -- the air conditioner should be doing the dehumidifying for you.
Humidity is something we hear about daily in weather reports. Humidity is to blame for that muggy, steam-room feeling you experience on certain summer days.
Humidity can be measured in several ways, but relative humidity is the most common. In order to understand relative humidity, it is helpful to first understand absolute humidity.
Absolute humidity is the mass of water vapor divided by the mass of dry air in a volume of air at a given temperature. The hotter the air is, the more water it can contain.
Relative humidity is the ratio of the current absolute humidity to the highest possible absolute humidity (which depends on the current air temperature). A reading of 100 percent relative humidity means that the air is totally saturated with water vapor and cannot hold any more, creating the possibility of rain. This doesn't mean that the relative humidity must be 100 percent in order for it to rain -- it must be 100 percent where the clouds are forming, but the relative humidity near the ground could be much less.
Humans are very sensitive to humidity, as the skin relies on the air to get rid of moisture. The process of sweating is your body's attempt to keep cool and maintain its current temperature. If the air is at 100-percent relative humidity, sweat will not evaporate into the air. As a result, we feel much hotter than the actual temperature when the relative humidity is high. If the relative humidity is low, we can feel much cooler than the actual temperature because our sweat evaporates easily, cooling us off. For example, if the air temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius) and the relative humidity is zero percent, the air temperature feels like 69 degrees Fahrenheit (21 C) to our bodies. If the air temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 C) and the relative humidity is 100 percent, we feel like it's 80 degrees (27 C) out.
People tend to feel most comfortable at a relative humidity of about 45 percent. Humidifiers and dehumidifiers help to keep indoor humidity at a comfortable level.
Dry is good. Enjoy your summer.
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