I’m in Pasadena, Texas, which is right next to the coast and it’s part of the larger Houston metroplex. It’s hot and quite humid here, especially during the summer when I’ll be away.
So do I leave my whole house AC on? What do I set it to? Or should I also buy a dehumidifier and set it to 50% or 60%? The main thing is, I don’t want all the sheetrock inside turning to mold, but I’m uncertain how much active machinery operation you need to accomplish this. What if I just turn everything off and leave? The roof was replaced in the last decade, and there’s no leaks that I know of. Do I actually need to burn several hundred kWh every month running refrigeration to keep this place intact? What happened with old houses in the days before refrigeration?
you could run central AC at like 85 degrees or so.
It should run enough to keep the humidity down in the house.
It will probably do better than a dehumidifier because it is going to trade air around in all the rooms.
Forgot to answer your second question.
Old houses were made from different materials and real woods, no flake board laminated recycled cardboard stuff, they could sit there for 200 years with no heat or AC without falling apart
Tip sheet from University of Florida’s, Institute of Food and Agricultural Science, on “How to Close Your Home.” Which is pretty much what you’re asking, only from the perspective of a snowbird asking how to prepare their home before retreating back to the North.
Keep it clean and dry is the basic idea. Running your A/C just before dawn—to de-humidify the house, I’m guessing—and setting it fairly high otherwise, is one of their main tools. There’s a rubric for estimating how much it’ll cost to do that, v/s having de-humidifiers in each room, etc…
Anyway, seems like it’d be applicable. Best wishes for your trip, and believe me, as a Houstonian, I’m envious that you’re getting out of here for the summer months. Makes me feel like Steve Martin in “L.A. Story”:
I live further south, in Texas. The last two summers, I went away for 6-8 weeks. The second time, I even forgot to turn off my computer, I lift it on hibernate. But unplug your modem, as a safeguard against anybody hacking your wifi over your data limit, which is apparently childishly easy to do and very expensive.
Don’t worry, everything will be fine. I left food in the fridge, it was all fine when I got back. Even the milk. The fridge will only use a few bucks worth of electricity, less than the cost of throwing out frozen food and replacing it. Don’t bother leaving your AC on, there’s nothing that can be harmed even if goes up to 100 inn there. Leave windows open enough for outside air to circulate through, and leave closet doors open
Make sure there are no containers of standing water anywhere and it can’t rain in, and toss a little boric acid down the drains and in the toilet bowl and tank. Cockroaches can only live about ten days without water, so if you have any, they’ll be magically gone when you get home. For that reason, you don’t even need to be overly aggressive about cleaning before you go.