The past several days the temperature has been in the low 30s and every morning I have had to sop up like 8oz of water around my windows. Like what the hell??? It's the worst when the weather first hits, when it goes from 78 degrees to 32 degrees in a couple of hours.
Why so much condensation? Is this normal? What a pain in the @ss. Do people up north have a different kind of window that stops this outrageous condensation?
We have a humidifier that runs when our furnace turns on, and it must be adjusted according to outside temp. The humidifier has to be dialed back to 25% and less when outside temp is 0F and lower, or else we get a layer of ice along the bottoms of the windows. Conversely, if we didn't have the humidifier, hands, lips, everything would be irritably dry. That was the case growing up when we had wood fired heat only. So, if your heating system isn't sucking enough of the humidity out of the indoor air it draws from, you definitely need a dehumidifier to remedy your problem.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
Reason provided:
Added stuff.
That doesn't happen up north here but that's because we don't go from 78 and humid to 32 in a matter of hours. It's pretty dry all winter here, especially indoors - the outside air is already dry, and then it leaks into your house and gets heated up and so the relatively humidity indoors can get pretty low. If you've got old single-pane windows you will get frost on the inside of the windows on really cold days though.
Absolute humidity is the actual measure the amount of moisture in given volume of air. The lower the temperature is, the lower its ability to hold moisture. Relative humidity (RH) is a variable value does tell you how dry the air actually is.
If you are heating to 70 degrees F, you can use RH to try to set conditions to be more comfortable, and less of a "Coke can out of the cooler and sweating" phenomena most everyone has experienced. At 70ish keep the RH above 30%. Air at 30 degrees and at 100% RH heating up to 70 degrees gets you ~20% RH. That can feel quite dry, so a humidifier is a solution. My grandmother used to heat a pot of water on the stove and let it vaporize when she felt it was too dry inside.
I live in the UK and often when I check the weather it reads as 80% humidty, 90%, 96% etc when it's not raining. But I don't get condensation. Maintain airflow - open window vents or crack the window a little. You can get massive silicone bags that soak up water.
If I was you I'd buy a weather station and see what the humidity is inside your house. You can use dettol on the windows or various things that prevent condensation but the moisture will go somewhere. Are you boiling a lot of vegetables, hanging up loads of wet clothes or having long showers? It isn't healthy to have high humidity inside so I'd look into it. You will get damp and mould problems if you don't sort it out. Has the place stood empty for a while before you moved in? It sounds like it needs airing out and put all of the radiators on with dehumidifiers going in each room.
It means that the dew point of the air inside your house is above the inside surface temperature of your windows.
You can fix the problem by dehumidifying the inside air, raising the temperature inside, getting windows with better insulation, or moving more air over the window to increase the window surface temperature.