The WINTER AIR Rule That Kept Old Houses DRY

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is water running down the inside of your windows on a cold morning. You wipe it off the sill because it has started to mark the paint, and you think of it as a window problem, or an old house problem. That water did not come in from outside. Every drop of it came out of your own house, out of the air in the room you are standing in, and it is only showing on the glass because the glass is the coldest thing in the room. There is a great deal more you cannot see, in your walls and your bedding and the backs of your cupboards. My grandfather taught me the answer in a hay mow, with no house involved. We had put up a load that went in a little green, and a week later he had me push my arm down into the middle of the stack. It was hot. Hot the way a horse is hot after work, in a barn where nothing was burning. He said hay that goes up wet heats itself, and if it heats enough it spoils, and men have lost barns that way. I asked what we would do, expecting him to say we would take it out into the sun. He opened the doors at both ends of the mow and left them open. Cold air holds almost no water. It cannot, it is too cold to. Bring it into a warm room and as it warms its capacity goes up with it, and now it is a sponge that has been wrung out, taking water from everything it touches. Put it back outside and all that water goes with it. You are not letting cold in. You are letting dryness in and carrying wet out. What we go through: Why short and wide beats a window cracked all day, and why the difference is the mass of your house Why you leave the heat on while you do it Why two windows on opposite sides, and why the doors inside should be open too When to air, and why the morning one matters most Where the water is actually made, and why drying washing indoors is the worst of it The bedroom, and what I will not tell you to do with a window in January Your windows as a free gauge, and how to read which ones tell you what Your nose as the second gauge Why furniture two inches off an outside wall matters more than people think Why a house built the year before last can have mold in it The plain limits, and they matter. This is a cold weather practice. It works because outside is colder and drier than inside, and that is the engine of it. Do not do it on a warm damp day, because airing a cool house on a muggy afternoon pours water in rather than taking it out. The test is simple: if it is colder outside than in, opening up dries your house. It also dries a house, it does not fix a leak. And it is not medicine. Damp rooms grow mold and mold is hard on a bad chest, and drying a house takes away what the mold lives on. That is real and worthwhile. Anything beyond it is a doctor's business. Tomorrow morning, look at the inside of your windows and see which have water on them. Then open two windows on opposite sides of the house as wide as they go, leave the heat where it is, and go and make your breakfast. Come back in five minutes and shut them. Do that for a week and look again. Tell me in the comments which windows get water on them and which do not, because the pattern tells you a great deal. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead whether you dry your washing indoors in winter. Next time we go looking for the cold air that gets in whether you invite it or not, with a lit candle and twenty minutes. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #WinterTips #Condensation #Damp #Mold #Ventilation #HeatingBill #OldWays #Homesteading #SelfReliance #HouseholdTips #IndoorAir #WoodStove #OldHouse #Winter