- 2 days ago
Water on the inside of winter windows is not really a window problem at all, and this calm home-keeping narration explains why. Drawing on an old Amish-style lesson from a hay mow, the video shows how cold air can help dry a house when it is brought in briefly and in the right way, instead of leaving a window cracked all day.
The method is simple: open two windows on opposite sides of the home wide for about five minutes, then close them again and let the warmth stay in the walls, floors, and furniture. It covers the best times to do it, how bathroom steam, cooking, laundry, and indoor drying add moisture, and why bedroom condensation, musty smells, and damp corners are useful clues. It also explains when this winter air rule works and when it does not, especially in warm humid weather or with actual leaks.
For anyone looking for old house tips, winter ventilation, condensation control, moisture problems, and practical home maintenance advice, this is a clear and memorable guide. It is especially useful for people searching for how to dry a house, reduce indoor humidity, stop window sweating, and understand why old houses stayed dry.
SEO: winter air rule, old house ventilation, condensation on windows, indoor humidity, home moisture control, dry house in winter, old house maintenance, window sweating, musty smell in house, practical home tips, Amish home-saving method, ventilation for old houses, moisture reduction, winter home care, homekeeping advice.
The method is simple: open two windows on opposite sides of the home wide for about five minutes, then close them again and let the warmth stay in the walls, floors, and furniture. It covers the best times to do it, how bathroom steam, cooking, laundry, and indoor drying add moisture, and why bedroom condensation, musty smells, and damp corners are useful clues. It also explains when this winter air rule works and when it does not, especially in warm humid weather or with actual leaks.
For anyone looking for old house tips, winter ventilation, condensation control, moisture problems, and practical home maintenance advice, this is a clear and memorable guide. It is especially useful for people searching for how to dry a house, reduce indoor humidity, stop window sweating, and understand why old houses stayed dry.
SEO: winter air rule, old house ventilation, condensation on windows, indoor humidity, home moisture control, dry house in winter, old house maintenance, window sweating, musty smell in house, practical home tips, Amish home-saving method, ventilation for old houses, moisture reduction, winter home care, homekeeping advice.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00There is water running down the inside of your windows on a cold morning.
00:04You wipe it off the sill with a cloth because it has started to mark the paint.
00:08And you think of it as a window problem, or an old house problem,
00:13or something that simply happens in winter and cannot be helped.
00:17That water did not come in from outside.
00:20Every drop of it came out of your own house, out of the air in the room you are standing
00:25in,
00:26and it is only showing itself on the glass because the glass is the coldest thing in the room.
00:32There is a great deal more of it that you cannot see,
00:35and it is in your walls and your bedding and the backs of your cupboards.
00:40And the old answer to it, which everybody in a cold country used to do every single day
00:46without thinking about it, is the thing I want to give you,
00:49because it costs nothing and it takes five minutes and almost nobody does it anymore.
00:56I am Elias Yoder. I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
01:01We heat with wood, and we have no machine anywhere in this house that dries the air,
01:06and our winters are long.
01:08So this is not a piece of history to me. It is how we get through February.
01:14I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:18The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
01:25My grandfather taught me this in the Hay Mow, and there was not a house involved anywhere in it.
01:30We had put up a load in July that had gone in a little green. Not badly. A little.
01:37And about a week later he took me up into the Mow and had me push my arm down into
01:42the middle of the stack,
01:43right down past the elbow. It was hot. Not warm. Hot. The way a horse is hot after work,
01:51and coming out of nowhere in a barn where nothing was burning.
01:55I asked him what was making it hot. He said the wet in it.
01:59He said hay that goes up wet heats itself, and if it heats enough, it spoils,
02:05and if it heats a great deal more than that, it will set your barn alight, and men have lost
02:11everything
02:11that way. Then I asked him what we were going to do about it, and I expected him to say
02:16we would
02:17take it all out into the sun. He did not. He opened the doors at both ends of the Mow
02:22and left them
02:23open, and he said the thing I have thought about every winter since. He said you do not dry a
02:30thing
02:30by warming it. You dry it by moving air through it. Cold air is not what takes the heat. Wet
02:37air is.
02:38Now let me tell you why cold air does that work, because this is the part that sounds backwards
02:44until you see it. Air holds water, and how much it can hold depends entirely on how warm it is.
02:51Warm air holds a great deal. Cold air holds very little. So the air outside on a freezing day,
02:59even in a snowstorm, even when it feels raw and wet on your face, is carrying almost no water at
03:06all.
03:06It cannot. It is too cold to. Bring that air into a warm room, and something happens that people find
03:14hard to believe the first time they hear it. As it warms up, its capacity for water goes right up
03:20with
03:21it, and now it is a sponge that has been wrung out. It takes water from everything it touches,
03:27off your walls, out of your bedding, off the damp towel and the wet boots and the pot on the
03:33stove,
03:33and then you put it back outside, and every bit of that water goes with it. That is the whole
03:40of it.
03:40You are not letting cold in. You are letting dryness in, and carrying wet out. And here is the part
03:48that
03:48makes the money argument. Damp air feels colder than dry air at the same temperature, because moisture
03:55carries heat off your skin. So a dry room at 65 feels better than a damp room at 68. Dry
04:03the house,
04:04and you can be comfortable at a lower setting, and that is a real saving and not a story. And
04:10the same
04:10rule is why my grandfather's haymow had doors at both ends, rather than one. One open door lets a
04:18little air wander in, and wander back out again. Two open doors at opposite ends give it somewhere to
04:25go, and then it runs straight through and takes the wet with it. A house is the same. That is
04:32the whole
04:33reason I am going to tell you to open two windows rather than one. Now, how it was actually done,
04:40because there is a right way and a wrong way, and the difference is everything. Short and wide,
04:48not long and narrow. Open the windows properly, as far as they go, two or three at once if you
04:54can,
04:55on opposite sides of the house, so the air runs straight through. Five minutes, ten at the outside,
05:03then shut them all. That is it. That is the whole practice, and it was done every morning,
05:10and often again before bed, in every cold country there is. Here is why short and wide beats a window
05:18cracked all day, and it is worth understanding, rather than taking on trust.
05:24In five minutes with the windows wide, the air in that room is completely exchanged, gone,
05:30and replaced with dry air. But the walls, the floor, the furniture, the whole mass of your house
05:37has barely begun to cool, because those things hold heat a great deal longer than air does. Shut the
05:45windows, and that mass warms the new air straight back up. You have thrown out the water and kept
05:52nearly all the heat. Now leave one window cracked all day instead. The air trickles out slowly, never
06:00fully changing, while the cold works steadily into the walls and the floor and the furniture the whole
06:07time. You lose the mass, which is the part that actually costs you, and you never properly clear the
06:15moisture. So the man who leaves a window on the latch all winter is doing the expensive version of this
06:21and getting the least out of it. Leave the heat on while you do it. People turn everything down first,
06:28thinking to save, and it is the one part of this that genuinely does not matter. Do not go around
06:35turning things down first. Five minutes is not long enough for it to matter, and the stove will not
06:42mind. When to do it. Morning is the important one, because a house has been shut up all night with
06:50everybody in it breathing, and that is when it is at its wettest. If you only ever do it once,
06:56do it then.
06:58A second airing before bed clears whatever the day put in, the cooking and the washing and the baths,
07:04so the night starts dry. And pick the same times and keep to them, because this only works as a
07:11habit.
07:12A house aired thoroughly twice on a Sunday, and not again until the following week, is a damp house
07:19six days out of seven. Now, where the water is coming from, because you may as well deal with it
07:26at
07:26the source. An ordinary household puts a surprising amount of water into the air every day. Cooking.
07:34Kettles. Baths and showers. Washing. Drying clothes indoors, which is by far the worst of them.
07:43House plants. And people just breathing all night. So vent where it is made. A window open in the kitchen
07:53while something is boiling. The bathroom aired straight after a bath, rather than an hour later,
07:59with the door shut so the damp does not walk through the house first. Lids on pans. And if
08:06you dry washing indoors, do it in one room with the door shut and a window open, and never in
08:14a bedroom.
08:15A load of wet washing hung in a closed bedroom overnight is pints of water going into that room,
08:22and it will come out on the coldest wall in there. And open the inside doors while you air. A
08:29shut door
08:30means you have aired one room and left the rest of the house exactly as it was. Doors open, two
08:38windows
08:38wide at opposite ends, and the whole house changes its air at once. That is what the old houses were
08:45built
08:46to let happen, with the transoms over the doors and the stair acting as a chimney. Now the bedroom,
08:53and here I want to correct something you will hear on this subject. You will be told the old people
08:59slept with the window open all night in the snow. Some did, and I am not going to tell a
09:06person on a
09:06fixed income, or somebody old, or somebody with pipes running through an outside wall, to leave a
09:12sash up until dawn in January. The good of it comes from the airing, not from sleeping cold,
09:19and you get nearly all of it in ten minutes. So throw the window wide for ten minutes before bed,
09:26and again first thing in the morning, with the covers thrown back off the bed. That clears the
09:32night's moisture off the mattress and out of the room, and it is the same practice I gave you for
09:38a
09:38mattress applied to the whole room. Keep the bedroom cooler than the rest of the house if you like,
09:45and put the warmth on the bed instead of in the air. Heavy bedding, wool, layers you can take off.
09:53That is how it was always done, and the reason the old houses had those great heaped beds. One more
10:01that
10:01costs nothing and that people miss entirely. Move the furniture off the outside walls. Two inches is
10:09enough. A wardrobe pushed flat against a cold outside wall has still air behind it that never changes,
10:18no matter how often you open a window. And that is where the trouble starts in a great many bedrooms.
10:25Give the air a way round the back of things. Same with a cupboard that smells shut up. Leave the
10:32door
10:32open while you air the room and let it have its share. Now, how do you know whether any of
10:39this is
10:40working? And this is the best part because it costs nothing. Your windows are the gauge. Condensation on
10:49the inside of your glass is your house telling you the air is too wet. Not the window's fault. Not
10:56the
10:56weather's fault. Too much water in that room. So look at them every morning. A little on the very bottom
11:04edge of the coldest window in the house is ordinary. Water running down the pane, or on several windows,
11:12windows, or on a window that is not the coldest one means you need to air more often or you
11:19have a
11:19source you have not dealt with. And when you have been airing properly for a week or two, you will
11:25watch that water go. That is the whole feedback you need and it is already in your house. There is
11:33a
11:34second gauge in your house as well and it is your nose. Walk out of doors for five minutes and
11:41come
11:41back in and smell the room. A house you live in all day you cannot smell at all, but come
11:48in from outside
11:49and a damp, stale room tells you plainly. That is worth doing once a week and a great many people
11:57have
11:57never once noticed what their own house smells like to a visitor. If you want a number rather than
12:05a judgment, a small dial gauge that reads the damp costs a few dollars and needs no power. You want
12:13to
12:13sit somewhere around half. Much above that through a winter and you are growing things whether you can
12:20see them or not. And a word on the old houses themselves, since people wonder why this was never
12:27written down anywhere. It was never written down because it did not need to be. Those houses breathed
12:35on their own. There were transoms over the doors, vents in the walls, a chimney pulling air up the
12:43whole time whether there was a fire in it or not, and windows and doors that leaked because nobody expected
12:51otherwise. Air moved through a house all day long without anybody deciding it should. We have spent
12:5960 years sealing all of that up for perfectly good reasons, and we have been a great deal better at
13:06the
13:06ceiling than at replacing what the ceiling took away. That is why you can find mold in a house built
13:14the year before last, which would have astonished my grandfather. Now the plane limits, and there are
13:21three. This is a cold weather practice. It works because the air outside is colder and drier than the air
13:30inside, and that is the whole engine of it. So do not do it on a warm, damp day. Airing
13:38a cool house on a muggy
13:40August afternoon pours water in rather than taking it out, and people do exactly that with cellars every
13:49summer and cannot understand why it gets worse. In the warm months, this rule turns itself around, and the
13:57answer then is a dry day rather than any day. The plane test is this. If it is colder outside
14:06than in, opening up
14:08dries your house. If it is warmer and muggier outside, it does not. Second, this dries a house. It does
14:18not fix a leak. A wall that is wet because water is coming through it from outside or coming up
14:26out of
14:26the ground is a different problem with a different answer, and opening a window will not keep ahead of it.
14:33The way to tell them apart is a square of plastic taped tight to the wall for two days, and
14:41I have
14:41shown you that elsewhere. If you have water coming in through a wall or up out of the ground, no
14:48amount
14:49of airing will keep ahead of it, and I have talked about how to tell the difference elsewhere. Third,
14:56word, and I will be square with you, this is not medicine. You will hear it said that fresh air
15:03cures
15:03winter coughs and clears the lungs. What I can tell you plainly is that damp rooms grow mold and mildew,
15:12and that mold in a house is hard on anybody with a bad chest. Drying a house takes away what
15:20the mold
15:20lives on. That is a real and worthwhile thing. Anything beyond it is a doctor's business and not
15:28mine. And a word for anybody whose house has a ventilation system already, a fan running quietly
15:36somewhere that you have perhaps never thought about, find out whether it is working and whether
15:42its filter has ever been changed, because a great many of them have not been touched since the house was
15:48built, and a blocked one is doing nothing at all while you assume it is doing everything. And if you
15:55have a tightly built modern house, know that it was designed on the assumption that something would
16:01ventilate it. If you have sealed it well and there is no machine doing that job, this practice is not
16:09optional for you. It is the only thing standing between your house and a damp problem. There is no
16:17scheme in any of this, and nobody arranged anything. The money simply runs the other way.
16:25There are dehumidifiers and ventilation systems and mold sprays, and every one of them is a real
16:32product, and for a house with a genuine problem, some of them are the right answer. It is only that
16:38nobody makes a living telling you to open two windows for five minutes every morning and shut them again,
16:45so nobody says it, and a thing nobody has a reason to say gets forgotten inside of one generation.
16:53What got lost was not a machine. It was an old man opening both doors of a haymow and leaving
17:01them
17:01open. And one caution about the cold itself, because I would rather say it than not. If it is bitter,
17:10below freezing hard, keep the airing short, and keep an eye on anything that can freeze. Do not open a
17:19window in a room where a pipe runs through an outside wall and then go out for the afternoon. Five
17:27minutes with you standing there is not the same as a window left up and forgotten, and forgetting is what
17:34does the damage. So here is what I would have you do tomorrow morning, and it costs nothing at all.
17:42Before you do anything else, go and look at the inside of your windows and see which ones have water
17:49on them and how much. Then open two windows on opposite sides of the house as wide as they will
17:56go,
17:57leave the heat where it is, and go and make your breakfast. Come back in five minutes and shut them.
18:05Do that every morning for a week, and then look at your windows again. And take one more look at
18:12the
18:13coldest corner of the coldest room while you are at it, down low behind whatever is standing there,
18:20because that is where the news arrives first. So tell me in the comments which windows in your house
18:29get water on them and which do not, because the pattern tells you a great deal, and most people
18:35have never once looked at it as a pattern. And if you have told me your county before, tell me
18:42this
18:43instead. Do you dry your washing indoors in winter? Because if you do, that is very likely where most of
18:52this is coming from. Next time, I want to go and find the cold air that is getting in whether
18:59you invite
18:59it or not, because there is a difference between air you let in on purpose for five minutes and air
19:06coming in round every window and door all day long. A lit candle carried slowly round the edges of a
19:14room
19:15will show you every bit of it, and you will see it move. Cold air is not what takes the
19:21heat. Wet air is.
19:23The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it.