Its that time of year again.Where my wife makes me waterboy for the winter.
Do these things work even a little bit.I would think that they might help in an 8x10 room but the whole house? Thanks
Which kind of things? There are lots of different kinds. We have a “whole house” humidifier installed to the furnace which helps a little but not as much as we thought it would. So we augment that with room humidifiers in the bedrooms. You would have to have a pretty heavy-duty unit to use a portable one for the whole house but I believe that they exist.
For the whole house you get a house humidifier, typically attached to the furnace. What you normally see on store shelves are room humidifiers, which do fine in one room. I wouldn’t count on a room humidifier to take care of a whole floor, much less an entire house.
Do you have a forced air circulation system? If so you can add an induct spray unit to add moisture to the whole house.
A gravity feed hot air furnace usually has a tank for evaporating water but it does not have sufficient evaporative capacity to maintain a reasonable relative humidity.
Room units have to be refilled and evaporative type require regular cleaning and removal of calcium residue. The misting units result in a fine dust of calcium residue particles on every horizontal surface in the room.
Like a garden hose? Just give all the carpets a once over and you’ll be good for days.
Any unit that can evaporate a half gallon into a typical bedroom overnight will make it pretty humid. You can certainly tell if the water disappears, and if you buy one of the little electronic humidity gages from Radio Shack (I bought several for a project and found them surprisingly accurate) then you can tell whether you’re in the range you want to be.
Much bigger and more expensive humidifiers should make the whole thing much more convenient, but the little cheap ones do work.
Yes they work but are a pain to keep clean. I’ll have to check to see what kind of have at home because I was lucky enough to stumble on one that has an inverted heating element - that way almost all of the hard water crap settles in the bottom of the cup and not on the heating element itself. It looks like the one on this page.
I suggest you avoid the cool mist kind because they will add a damp chill to the air.