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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2117 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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People who live in hot countries and have air-con at home, doesn't the dry air bother you?

I've found that whenever I try to sleep with aircon on holiday my throat gets incredibly dry, but obviously it's still better than sleeping in the heat.

As far as I'm aware, the rapidly growing Sun Belt isn't full of people complaining about dry throats at night, so clearly I'm missing something.

Is this when you are traveling overseas? Perhaps you are just getting a mild respiratory infection from cold viruses you are not accustomed to.

Having experienced both, I've found that I much prefer dry heat over wet heat.

The dry air never bothered me much, but I admit I was merely visiting as opposed to living there for a year at a time.

Some people buy personal humidifiers, and keep them beside their bed. I grew up in an extremely hot, dry desert, and probably just acclimated. Also, we switch off between an AC unit and swamp cooler. As a kid, we had a swamp cooler in most of the house, and one room with an AC, and my parents were constantly telling us which windows we needed to open or close accordingly.

Is this a wall/window unit or central air? We have our wall units deep cleaned about once every two years or so. I don't know if it's planned obsolescence (or a racket) but the thinking is that Japanese wall units get a lot of crud that needs flushing out and otherwise gets breathed in and can cause irritants to those sensitive. This even when you run the self clean mode and/or clean out the removable filters.

No. A properly sized air conditioner should actually raise the humidity because the same amount of moisture in a colder air is higher humidity.

Now obviously theres air conditioners that are not properly sized and mess up the humidity. But in residential(disclaimer- I haven’t done residential that wasn’t a favor in 7 years) it’s more common to have the opposite problem, where the AC drops the temperature faster than it pulls moisture out.

As @ToaKraka says this is the inverse problem most people have, but you can just run a humidifier in your bedroom. They're cheap and you just fill the water tank every 1-2 days and clean it out once a season.

According to my copy of ACCA Manual J (Abridged Edition), which specialists use to design HVAC systems:

  • The target for comfort generally is dry-bulb temperature of 75 °F (24 °C) and relative humidity of 50 % (absolute humidity around 65 gr/lb or 0.93 %).

  • Houses often have uncomfortably high humidity during the cooling season and uncomfortably low humidity during the heating season. What you are describing is the reverse of the typical situation.

  • "Adding a humidifier to the heating system moderates [the problem of low humidity during the heating season], but if a humidifier is installed it must not produce a visible or concealed condensation problem. See section 27 [of the unabridged Manual J, which I do not have] for more information on this subject."

I don't live in a hot country buy whenever it's hot here and I run out AC I've never been bothered by a dry throat, neither have I while on vacation.

Perhaps this is you problem? Perhaps you breathe through you mouth when you sleep? Maybe you could try using tape?

No I definitely breath through my nose when I sleep. Probably it's just that my body hasn't got used to air con air since I live in frigid northern Europe.

So do I.

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