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Whole House Humidifiers

Residential Flow-Through Humidifier Solutions

Home Humidity Solutions

aprilaire model 1830 dehumidifier

Does Your Home Lack Humidity?

When you have the correct level of humidity in your house, most people notice that it is easier to breathe and everything feels much more comfortable. No more problems with feeling that your skin, eyes, throat, and the air in your house is too dry. Properly managing indoor humidity tends to decrease – if not completely – remove problems from static electricity. Another benefit of using indoor humidification solutions is that they can help save your furniture, flooring, and any wood items in your home from unnecessary dry weather problems.

Our residential humidifier experts can help you identify the best humidity solutions for your home. Contact us today for more information.

We Can Help You Reduce Static Electricity
& Dry Air in Your Home

Winter season is here… Along with Dry Air

You’ve currently seen the dryness, right? Maybe you’ve started using more chap stick, or, dug out the wool socks, and moved throughout the house rubbing your feet on the carpet. Then you fired of a few a shocking static electricity surprises to your significant other (or your kids). This means that there is very little humidity in the air.

 

Is it Time for an Entire Home Humidification System?

Entire-house humidifiers are totally common in many newer homes. A whole house humidification system will link to your ductwork and move damp air into your house. This helps in raising your relative humidity and is a significant help in improving total home comfort levels.

However, in a similar way that dehumidifiers aren’t the only option to reduce humidity during the hot summer  months, humidifiers aren’t the only choice to increase humidity during the cold winter months. A good piece of advice is that humidifiers can sometimes trigger additional problems.

 

Pros and Cons of Humidifiers

No one decides to install a whole-house humidification system unless they’re having a home comfort issues. A lot of people absolutely can’t stand having dry skin throughout winter months. It can even be a painful problem for some people. Using a humidification system will most likely help a person’s skin, hair and overall body from feeling too dry.

The air can get so dry that wood home furnishings can split and floorboards can also split or warp. Large wooden instruments, like pianos, tend to get out of tune and might warp also.

Super-low humidity simply isn’t enjoyable. Whenever indoor relative humidity lowers into the twenty percent range, it’s an excellent idea to increase a home’s humidity levels. The crucial thing is, humidifiers might create more problems than they solve:

Home humidifiers may set off mold growths, and this is something that happens more often than you may believe. Because humidity adheres to cold area and your house includes numerous cold area throughout winter season, the environment is normally best for fuzzy, black things to appear.

You may not be able to visually perceive the growing mold. While humidifier-induced mold often hangs on to ceilings and walls, the mold that arises from your humidifier isn’t continuously visible. Instead, the growing mold may actually be spreading inside your walls or – and this is rather typical – growing within the lining in your ducts. The “musty ducts” scenario is frequently most likely if you have uninsulated ducts or a lot of your ductwork lives in an unconditioned location (like your attic). It’s cold in your attic, so moisture collects on the ducts when your humidifier is running, and this moisture is what mold needs to grow.

Mold problems negatively affect indoor air quality at a level that most people are not aware of – or do not take seriously enough. It’s bad to breathe mold spores, and if a person suffers from asthma, a musty environment can actually threaten their overall well-being.

The bottom line is that you do not wish to grow mold in your home, however you do not desire your air to be too dry either. What can you do to increase indoor humidity without increasing the threat of mold development?

 

Consider air sealing your home as a humidifier alternative

You have to ask and understand, how did your indoor air get so dry to begin with…?

Cold air from the outdoors permeated your house through spaces and fractures in the foundation. To solve this issue, you need to seal the points of entry for that dry air, and you’ll increase your relative humidity.

 

If you do a great job, you will not require a humidifier at all

Warm air moves toward cooler environments as a basic scientific principle. When the heat is turned on, the hot air produced by a heating unit ultimately escapes a house towards the cooler outdoors. To keep a pressure balance inside a structure, the warm air that leaves your home is continuously being replaced (expensively) by cool air that penetrates your home. This is air seepage. It’s the draft you feel under your front door. It’s the cold air that leaks in around your windows.

 

Seal these sources of air leak

One can block the holes and leaks by which warm air leaves your house, and in doing so, you prevent air seepage from the outdoors. This will help prevent the indoor humidity from getting too low.

Consider air sealing your entire house prior to purchasing a whole-house humidifier. By doing so, you’ll stay in a great position to alleviate uneasy dryness and avoid all the issues gotten in touch with humidifiers.

The best technique to discover your most considerable sources of air leak is by means of a blower door test. That technique, you can figure out both the air seepage rate and acknowledge the most significant sources of leakage.

 

 

Installing the Whole House Humidifier anyways…

Air sealing should be the very first method to try in order to decrease complications caused by dry indoor air. Keep in mind though, there are circumstances when you might prefer a humidifier anyhow. For example, perhaps your home activities do not create sufficient humidity to make you comfortable, even after you’ve air sealed your house. You will still need a humidifier to even things out and create a comfortable internal environment that plays nicely with your HVAC system.

Whatever your criteria for setting up a whole-house humidifier might be, these considerations will help you avoid prospective mold and indoor air quality issues.

  • Steam humidifiers: Steam humidifiers boil water by themselves unlike bypass humidifiers, which “take” a little hot air from your supply duct to produce water vapor. Steam humidifier designs are more efficient because more humidity is created in less time.
  • Run only with the heat on: Setting the humidifier to run when the heating unit is turned on means that the hot air is blowing the wetness out of your ducts and into your home.

Every home is truly a unique space, so your humidifier setup may need a unique method. Contact us today to discover how your local heating and cooling professionals can help make your home more comfortable with our great HVAC services!

Click to Call: 503.698.5588

Address:   4040 SE International Way
STE E105 Milwaukie, OR 97222

Hours:   Mon – Fri: 7AM – 6PM
Sat – Sun: by Appointment

CCB#   187834

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