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Pool home cooling and humidity in Lake Mary, Florida

44.5% of improved residential parcels in the City of Lake Mary tax district have a pool — 2,378 of 5,343, the highest share of the seven Seminole County cities measured. Pool houses carry extra glass, extra latent load and a lanai, and they are the houses most often sized wrong.

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Why a pool changes the equipment, not just the view

A pool house is not a normal house with water outside. Three things travel with it, and all three land on the air conditioner.

Glass. Pool houses are the ones with the wide sliding-glass span onto the lanai, often on the west or south elevation. Glass is the largest single sensible load in a Central Florida house and it is the input a rule-of-thumb sizing ignores entirely.

Moisture. Every door opening moves humid air inside, and in a screened lanai the air on the other side of that door has been sitting over open water all day. That is latent load: the work of removing moisture rather than temperature, and it is the half of the load a tonnage number does not describe.

Occupancy pattern. Doors open and close all afternoon in exactly the hours the system is already at its peak. The result is a house that reads 74°F on the thermostat and still feels wrong.

The mistake this leads to, and why it is expensive

The instinctive fix for a clammy house is a bigger system, and it is the wrong one. An oversized air conditioner satisfies the thermostat quickly, shuts off, and never runs long enough to pull moisture out of the air. Dehumidification happens over sustained runtime, so a system that is too large is measurably worse at it than one that is correctly sized.

A 76°F house at 50% relative humidity is more comfortable than a 74°F house at 65%, and it costs less to run. That is the whole argument for sizing from a Manual J load calculation with the latent load broken out from the sensible load, rather than copying the tonnage off the old data plate. How sizing should actually be done ›

If your quote does not separate latent from sensible load, on a pool house in this market, it is not a load calculation. It is arithmetic on square footage.

What actually helps a clammy Lake Mary pool home

Correct sizing first. It is free at the point of replacement and impossible to fix afterwards without replacing again.
Variable-speed or two-stage equipment, which runs longer at lower capacity and therefore dehumidifies far better than a single-stage system cycling on and off.
Duct sealing, especially on the return side. A leaking return in a hot attic pulls attic moisture straight into the system and undoes everything else. Duct replacement cost ›
A thermostat that can control humidity, not just temperature, paired with equipment that can act on the signal.
A dedicated dehumidifier where the latent load genuinely exceeds what a correctly sized system can handle. This is a real answer for some houses and an upsell on others — ask for the latent load number that justifies it.
Condensate capacity that matches the runtime. A system doing serious dehumidification produces serious condensate, and in an attic air handler the secondary drain and float switch are what stand between that and your ceiling.

The 44.5% figure, and where it comes from

2,378 of 5,343 improved residential parcels in the City of Lake Mary tax district carry a pool in the Seminole County Property Appraiser’s CAMA extract, or 44.5%. That is the highest share of the seven Seminole County cities measured for this project.

It is concentrated, too. Reserve at Lake Mary shows 108 pools across 143 parcels; Cardinal Oaks Cove 95 of 110; Timacuan Unit 16 88 of 120; Lake Mary Woods 81 of 94; Woldunn 80 of 80. The townhome developments — Fountain Parke, Lake Mary Landings, Griffin Park — show none at all. The full subdivision table ›

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Sources for this page

Researched 6 September 2026. Fees, rebate amounts and code minimums change — check the issuing authority before you rely on a figure.