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Los Angeles Storage Guide

Climate Controlled Storage in Los Angeles: Luxury or Necessity?

Self-storage serves one simple, but important, purpose: as a space to keep your belongings safe. You aren’t going to pay a monthly fee for storage unless you have the need to keep things for a later time, and you don’t want find that those things have been be damaged when you go to retrieve them. That’s why storage facilities offer several optional amenities to ensure the safety of your belongings and your peace of mind, the most important of which is climate controlled storage. Climate control will protect your belongings from damage due to temperature and humidity, but these two factors are very specific to the city in which you live. Climate control can be substantially more expensive than a normal storage unit, putting you in a tough spot in trying to balance between price and protection. So the question is, do you need a climate controlled storage unit in Los Angeles?

What does climate control do?

Storage units with climate control systems are typically kept at between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit—the exact temperature is not an industry standard and so differs with each facility, which means you should makes sure and ask the facility manager what range they stay within. These units are typically contained within one large building, and are not directly accessible from the outside. Such buildings are often several stories tall, meaning that while climate controlled units are more secure from the outside, they’re also much harder to pack things into. Different storage facilities use different types and combinations of climate controlled systems. These typically include heaters and air conditioning, and can also include humidifiers/dehumidifiers.

Heat and humidity dangers:

A wide variety of household objects and commonly-stored items are vulnerable to temperature and humidity. High heat can ruin electronics, for instance, while extreme colds can make glass brittle. When temperatures change rapidly, condensation can form, and such moisture will destroy electronic circuits and deface many organic materials.

Despite the dangers of temperature, it’s humidity that should be your main concern. High humidity is dangerous for any type of organic material—papers, photographs, rugs, carpets, clothing, canvas, leather, wood, fur; if it was once alive, it’s in danger from humidity. Why? Because high humidity will cause mold and mildew to form on organic materials. In the least damaging cases mold and mildew will leave your things with a musty scent that’s nearly impossible to get rid of, while in the worst case they’ll completely destroy them.

The magic number is 55 RH, or ‘relative humidity.’ At anything above this level, mold and mildew spores will begin to spread. You probably know whether or not the climate in your city—in this case LA—is relatively humid or dry, but not its specific average RH, which changes throughout the year. In order to determine whether you need climate control, we’ll need to look at the exact numbers.

So what’s LA’s climate like?

Los Angeles has a Subtropical-Mediterranean climate, which means that its winters are mild and its summers are warm-to-hot, while the Pacific Ocean keeps temperature changes moderate. Despite the fact that summers can get quite hot, they are typically dry, with most rainfall happening in the winter. Because of this, rising summer temperatures keep a relatively level humidity.

The average temperature in LA in May is 67 degrees Fahrenheit, with humidity levels around 55 RH. June averages 70 degrees with 56 RH, July 74 degrees with 64 RH, while August averages 75 degrees with 53 RH. In the autumn, September averages 74 degrees with an RH of 54, October averages 69 degrees with 54 RH, while temperatures drop to 63 degrees with 53% humidity.

Los Angeles winters are extremely mild, and the same is true of spring: December’s average temperature is 58 degrees with a RH of 52, January averages 59 degrees with 53 RH, February average 60 degrees with 54 RH, March averages 61 degrees with 55 RH, and April averages 64 degrees with 51% humidity.

With temperatures as moderate as Los Angeles’s and with its humidity hardly ever exceeding the mold threshold of 55 RH, climate-controlled storage in Los Angeles is not as important as it is in many other cities. Unless your items are especially vulnerable to certain temperatures and levels of humidity, you should be safe without a climate controlled unit, particularly if you’re only keeping your things in a unit for a relatively short period of time. That being said, there are two things you should keep in mind. First, LA is an expansive city with varying microclimates caused by the interaction between the hills and the ocean, meaning that temperatures and humidity levels can be extremely different in different neighborhoods. Find out what you can about the particular climate of your facility’s neighborhood. The second thing is that though LA’s average humidity hovers near 55 RH, mornings can be far more humid, often topping 80 RH. Which means that there is some danger of mold, the best way to protect against which is to widely space the items inside your unit and to give them as much air as possible

Brian Shreckengast is a writer at SelfStorageDeals.com, a leading price-focused search engine for finding cheap storage units. For more storage wisdom, check out the SSD blog.


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