Humidifier vs PC, Is It Dangerous to Have Them in a Room?

Many people, either because of the place where they live or due to breathing problems, need a humidifier in the room where they live and in many cases, they have one for each room of the house. But when we talk about humidity in the environment and PCs or electronic devices, problems of condensation and derivatives come to mind. How safe is it to have a humidifier in a room where our PC is? Is it safe for hardware?

In extremely arid areas, a humidifier for each house is more than recommended, but there are places where the relative humidity changes constantly through the seasons of the year, being very aggressive in summer and low, or being less intrusive and high in winter. For this reason, the humidifier is also necessary and entails the eternal question of the danger for a PC due to the large differences in temperature it produces.

Humidifier vs PC

Is the relative humidity of a humidifier harmful to a PC?

Humidificador-PC-2

The first thing we must understand is that the relative humidity of the air in any room in our house must be between 30% to 50% according to the EPA, but it is also specified that the more heat, a higher degree of humidity will be needed and a lower temperature will also require less relative humidity.

However, there are studies that affirm that it should be between 40% and 60%, since bacteria and viruses can appear below in certain environments, or even respiratory diseases. But focusing on the issue that matters, how much relative humidity do manufacturers stipulate that a room must have so as not to damage the PC?

The answer is as simple as it is straightforward: the less the better. To give an average and approximate value, the tests are normally carried out in environments that, according to the manufacturer, range between 30% and 60% relative humidity.

Ambient humidity vs PC

Humidificador-PC-5

Temperature differences are the great problem of environmental humidity, to the point that manufacturers such as ASRock included a pre-heating system in certain motherboards to avoid condensation and thus avoid errors or disasters in their hardware.

High ambient humidity per se is not bad as we have seen, but in contact with a higher temperature body it condenses in the form of water and obviously we do not want the liquid element in our hardware.

For this, it is necessary that the humidity within the tower reaches a value of 100%, so the temperature will be the determining factor, since hot air admits more water vapor than cold air and as a rule, a tower will always be at a higher indoor temperature than the room.

Is condensation possible in a tower? It is really difficult, we would have to start with a relative humidity of more than 80% in the environment and also use a quality humidifier for this to occur, without forgetting a high average temperature. In any case, having a humidifier at home is a sign that we are below that 80% by a lot, so we should not worry about our PC for condensation, but rather about the ambient temperature of the room and the tower, which that will be a determining factor that could damage the PC if the temperatures are very high.