Skylight in the kitchen has condensation which them leaks down the walls. New roof, added roof vents and new dual pane plexiglass skylight 3-months ago. Skylight does not leak in rain.

Condensation happens in the cold weather. 24/28 degrees outside temp and we have the house temp set at 73/75. There in lies the problem. Condensation starts to form on metal casing and drip. After the new roof, we had painters patch and repair drywall damaged from the prior condensation.

Solutions I have been told; Get rid of skylight, Stuff insulation in Skylight tunnel until spring, put a fan in skylight area.

So, has anyone experienced this issue? Thoughts on how to eliminate the condensation dripping which damages the drywall and wood floors below??

Thanks for thoughts and suggestions.

quote:

Originally posted by urbanwarrior238:
So, has anyone experienced this issue?

Not on a skylight, but, believe-it-or-not, on the ceilings at the perimeter of the home, on the coldest exposures (north and west).

Took a while to figure out what was happening. Thought it was ice dams. Nope. Condensation.

You can't beat physics. Warm air rises. Warm, moist air rises with even more energy. Warm, moist air hits cooler surface. Temperature drops below dew point. Condensation forms.

In our case the solution was to install a Honeywell HumidiPro device to automatically keep the humidity to the max the homes envelope would support without condensation forming.

To give you an idea of how low that can be, based on outdoor temperature (from the Honeywell HumidiPro user's manual):



I found I can set our humidity to be slightly higher than that w/o causing problems. My clue is when we start seeing condensation around the bottom edges of the windows. Then I know we're at or darn close to the limit.

As a practical matter: It doesn't do any good to try to boost the homes humidity to any higher than the envelope will support. Any moisture in the air, beyond that, will simply condense out of the air, anyway.

A fan to keep the air moving up there may or may not provide relief--depending upon what kinds of temperature differentials we're talking about and how high you're keeping your wintertime temperature and humidity.

We keep our home temperature at 72-73°F in wintertime, btw. I imagine if we were keeping it at 75°F, I'd have to drop the humidity a bit to compensate.