Last week's post contained some weather data for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, home to the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.
This building contains about one million square feet (100,000 square meters) of hardwood flooring. That's a lot of potential issues, especially with their outside conditions. The building is complete now, but while it was being built, they did encounter some flooring issues. Some were due to climate control issues. From what I saw on this trip, they have things pretty well under control.
As a comparison of climates, a dew point of 55 F degrees gives you about 50% RH at 75 degrees. So you can vent with that all day, and just add or remove a little heat to maintain 75 degrees. When you get to a dew point of 75 degrees, you have to remove half the water in the air to get to a RH of 50%. We have to do that in the Southeast, and sometimes the Midwest, in the summer. And we often struggle to do it. Places like Tucson have a lower dew point, and may be hotter outside. You would have to add water to get to 50% RH and 75 degrees indoors.
But at a dew point of 86, like they have in Dubai, you have to remove twice as much water as we do in the Southeast U.S. to get to 50% RH at 75 degrees. That's hard to do with standard A/C equipment. And equipment failures can result in wild humidity swings in a hurry. I covered some of this in my Wood Floors and Summer Moisture webinar. I'll cover more in an upcoming Winter Moisture webinar.
Dubai was probably the cleanest city I have been in. The architecture was beautiful. Getting around was easy and inexpensive, but you could spend a lot of money there if you wanted to. The indoor ski slope was pretty neat. And if you think the Mall of America is big, you should see the Mall of the Emirates.
