Your Basement Laundry Room Can Be Better

After years of being relegated to the basement, laundry rooms person mostly moved supra crushed successful homes built over the past 25 oregon truthful years.

But if your location was constructed earlier upstairs laundry rooms were the norm, your washer and dryer are astir apt successful your basement. While that makes consciousness from a space-saving perspective, damp basement conditions aren’t perfect for doing laundry. Here are a fewer improvements you tin marque to your basement laundry country (or area).

The occupation with doing laundry successful the basement

Yes, it’s inconvenient having to schlep your soiled laundry down the stairs (if you don’t person a chute), and past backmost up the stairs erstwhile it’s clean. But there’s a bigger contented that impacts some your location and your laundry.

“Laundry rooms mostly thin to nutrient rather a spot of humidity and heat, and erstwhile you spot your laundry country successful the basement, moisture has less places to disperse,” interior decorator Brett Elron told Realtor.com. “This tin pb to much cases of mold and rot successful your floors and walls.”

Plus, if it’s overly humid and damp successful your basement, immoderate laundry you permission down determination tin extremity up smelling musty.

How to amended your basement laundry room

Fortunately, determination are a fewer things you tin bash to amended the conditions successful your basement laundry area. Here are immoderate to consider:

• Install ventilation and exhaust fans: There are multiple options and setups, but the thought is to get the moist aerial retired of the basement, and caller aerial in.
• Open the windows: This isn’t imaginable successful each basements, arsenic galore person glass-block windows, but opening windows oregon doors (as agelong arsenic there’s a surface door) provides earthy ventilation.
• Make definite your dryer is decently ventilated: Not lone are unvented dryers a occurrence information risk, but they besides add a batch of moisture to the basement air, expanding the dampness.
• Monitor the humidity level: If you don’t already person a mode of determining the humidity level successful your basement, put successful a tiny integer country thermometer that besides measures humidity (there are plentifulness of options under $10).
• Get an aerial purifier: Just beryllium definite it’s 1 that takes attraction of mold spores successful the air.
• Add immoderate lighting: Basements thin to deficiency earthy light, which tin marque it hard to spot stains connected clothing. A task lamp oregon clip-on inferior airy tin marque a large difference.
• Air-dry laundry upstairs oregon outside: The lack of sunlight and airflow successful the basement not lone means it’ll instrumentality longer for your laundry to air-dry, it besides means that the bedewed items volition summation the humidity down there.

What astir dehumidifiers?

If the humidity successful your basement is over 60%, a dehumidifier tin help. That said, a dehumidifier is lone a temporary solution, due to the fact that it doesn’t code the root of the humidity.

In fact, according to the University of Minnesota Extension, they tin marque things worse: “By drying retired the basement air, moisture is drawn into the basement much rapidly causing efflorescence and spalling of factual and further harm to interior finishes.”

To forestall this from happening, you tin program your dehumidifier to support an optimal comparative humidity level, which is betwixt 30% and 50%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. If yours doesn’t person that feature, show the humidity levels successful your basement to guarantee it doesn’t get excessively dry.