Humidifier

What level should the indoor humidity level be in the house?

My uneducated guess would be about 40 to 50 % relative humidity.
I know it's too dry when I get static electricity snaps when I touch things.

Ok, I just bought a whole house humidifier. I think i'll really benefit from having more moisture in the air. Besides, it really dries the house (and me) out. Thanks for the suggestion.

what kind did you get?

I bought a Kenmore from Sears. It has a 12 gallon output. Rated for 2500 sq ft.

About 35%-40%. Any higher and you'll be growing things where you don't want to grow them.

Ed, you can have all the humidity from my house!

I fired up the stove Wed. night & when I woke up in the morning, all the windows in the house were fogged up!

The joys of a wet basement & a hot coal fire!

Agreed-35-40% sounds better then my post of 40-50%.

Smitty, My house has some type of stream or passageways through rock under it. With all the rain we had here the post few days, the cellar is dry. Late this afternoon I noticed a few damp spots around the walls from ground water seeping down.

The problem is when the stream under the cellar starts to flow. What ever the level around the cellar is, that's the level the water wants to be inside the cellar. I'm used to it after 18 years, but last April during the nor'easter it caught me unprepared. I only had 1 pump set up and ended up with 2.5 feet of water in the place. The cellar can be dry for 1, sometimes 2 years. Then...heavy rain for a few days, or rain and a big snow melt and we're swimming.

I'd like to see a "basement waterproofing" company try to fix this. My neighbor who has a much never house at the same elevation as mine has the same problem.

I have a few shots ofter the great flood of '07, but I have to get them below 300 kb to post them.

So...you're not alone!

I've got an underground river too. It only flows inside when the swamp in my yard is full enough to flow towards a pipe that goes under the street. I had some come in the other day thru the fieldstone, but the cellar is dry for the most part.

Gotta love fieldstone foundations!

The water itself doesn't bother me, but the heat from the stove sending the vapor up to my un-vented roof is beginning to cause some major structural issues -- all the 100+ year old timbers & the new plywood have been completely soaking wet from condensation ever since the coal stove was put in.

Trying to find time to install some gable vents. Of course, nothing is easy -- I need to see what beams, if any, might be hiding behind the 3 gable ends of the house -- 2 are over 100 yrs old & one is from sometime in the last century. This means pulling down the already mickey-moused upstairs ceiling in the middle of the winter, removing what little insulating properties it has....

Looks like we are in the same boat with our cellars. Sounds like you have your hands full with the condensation issue. That can cause major damage if left unresolved.

Got to love these old places!!!

There's a solution to your water problem, you could get a backhoe and dig a trench completely around your house deeper than the foundation and lay tiles in to divert all the water. It might help but the cash drainage will hurt more than the flooded basement. I have a step in my basement where a miniature creek flows, luckily some engineer in the 1880's fixed it by installing floor drains in the basement floor, when the creek rises and flows out of the step it just goes across the floor and down the drain. My buddy lives in there also, he's a spotted salamander about 10" long. Kinda neat when he comes out, he's basically purple with orange spots.

Before the concrete floor was poured a drain was installed underneath that runs into the sump, when water begins running out of it I know the stream is rising. When I dug out where the furnace was to install the second sump it was completely dry. The idea of excavating around the house is a good idea, however much too costly! It probably would require quite a pumping system also. Another neighbor with a approx. 20 year old house has a french drain around it, emptying into a sump under the ground with a pump, that manages to keep the water at bay for the most part. I don't think that house is over the main part of the underground flow, however.

I've seen quite a few salamanders and the like when the water is flowing.