Ceiling Fan Makes Light Work Of Getting your Room Dry

After another year of extensive flooding and now the flood waters have receded many people are wondering what is the best and easiest way to rapidly dry out the ground floor of their home.  A ceiling fan will cut the time to dry out your house from weeks to days.  Unfortunately you can’t just roll it all up and stick it in the tumble drier so here is a practical guide of what you can do.  Before you start take plenty of photos for your insurance claim.

1. Pump – Get hold of a suction pump (borrow, buy or hire) and pump out as much water as possible.
2. Towels – If you have a tumble drier then use towels to soak up as much water that is left.  Walk around on them to get them to soak up as much water and damp as possible.
3. Lift the carpets – If you are insured then remove the carpets and underlay and throw out (order a skip).  If you are not then you’ll need to dry them out so you can continue to use them until you can afford to buy new ones.  Lift them and the underlay too so that air can circulate under them.
4. Fit your ceiling fans – it should take about an hour per room.  This will be a great investment of time that will pay for itself many times over.
5. Open all the windows and doors – upstairs and down so you get a through draft in your house.  Warning – it will get cold because all the water evaporating takes a lot of heat 2.26 M Joules/kg in fact which in practical terms means it’ll take a 3 kw kettle 13 mins to fully vaporize 1 litre of water.  To overcome this you need to get your central heating on continuously or if it is not working get some other form of mobile electric or gas heaters.
6. Keep the air moving – This is essential since air will quickly get saturated with water vapour and cannot then take any more regardless of how much heating is being supplied.  This is encountered as humidity.  Dry air has a very low humidity whereas wet air will be 100%.  At 100% humidity no more evaporation can take place. That saturated air has to be removed from the room and in the final stages from all the damp surfaces in the room.  This can be easily achieved with a ceiling fan.  An extractor fan could be used but moves very little air whereas a ceiling fan will typically move 12-15,000 m3/h or air.  Saturated air can hold 9.4g/m3 at 10 deg c. This increases to 30 g/m3 at 30 deg c. So a typical ceiling fan can dry and move approximately 0.4 m3/h of water per hour at 30 deg c.
7. Move the carpets – as they dry out lift the remaining portions of the carpets so that they can dry out too.  Depending on the heat you have and how dry the outside air coming in is you should be able to dry the rooms out in 3-5 days.  Without a ceiling fan it could take much longer 2-3 week.
8. Costs – the cost of the whole exercise including the ceiling fans should be reclaimable from your insurance.  This is because you have a duty to minimise your losses and by getting your house dried out quickly you save on other heating costs and equipment rental.