Whole house humidifiers

I’m the same, thus a humidifier in the bedroom. It does indeed help a lot with skin issues/itching, and even colds and chest congestion.

We get that too, fresh deli bread is both awesome and not, because of that. We store about 1/2 a loaf in the freezer and after about a day, any fresh loaves go in the fridge. You get a little staleness after a while, but it really keeps the mold at bay.

Hell, one of the reasons I don’t bake is that we would have a ton of spoilage. :(

Sadly after the original fridge in our unit died and the homeowners replaced it with The World’s Tiniest Fridge ™, finding space for bread in there can be a real bitch–esp. if I wanna rotate a couple of different kinds of loaves for different purposes.

So I mostly just don’t eat much bread anymore.

Humidity outside right now is 70%. Yeah Florida.

Yeah it’s a bitch for us as well, which is why we split a loaf in half, putting half in the freezer, half in the fridge. It would probably help if we just bought shelf bread, which has preservatives, but screw all that. When I get the rare need for bread, I want good stuff.

I should have read closer. Furnace, not radiator…DUH.
Get one!

I actually like the taste of preservatives. But then again I also prefer playing online games with randos vs. friends.

I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo… what the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.

If they made that fantastic sourdough bread that I buy at the deli in a more storable form, I’d be on it.

I’m right here with you. I’ve done the single room humidifiers before, and damn if they weren’t nearly useless at my last place. The furnace just pulled all the moisture out in winter, we’d have to fill our 5 gallon humidifier multiple times a day just to keep living areas in the low to mid 20’s. And this meant my wife would frequently wake with itchybdry skin, and I with a sore throat.

Our house has a whole house humidifier that was there when we moved, and it is so much better.

Dude, I never had either, until I splurged on one of these about 4 years ago. And I love it to death. It’s incredibly accurate (when compared to the radio or TV news outdoor temps and humidity), and cheap to boot.

You get indoor and outdoor temps and humidity, and it will maintain your record highs and lows. The outdoor sending unit has only used up one set of 2 batteries (AA or AAA I can’t remember) in 4 years.

And its forecasting, while not perfect, is actually much better than I expected.

We check the thing several times a day.
Well, okay, this is not exactly the same as mine, but very close. I guess they quit making the one I have.

https://www.amazon.com/AcuRite-Weather-Temperature-Humidity-Forecaster/dp/B00GLDQFPY/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1512627708&sr=8-2-fkmr1&keywords=acu-rite+02038W

Ah. Here’s exactly the one I have. The Acu-Rite 02038W. I prefer this one, because the graphical forecaster is much prettier to look at.

We have one of those weather stations as well, and smaller indoor only ones for the kids’ rooms. We’re at 6% humidity outside now, hence the crazy fire warnings all over Southern California. Inside we’re at 21% for the main living area, We do run 2 humidifiers in the kids’ rooms. With their doors closed, we can get it to about 40-50% in about 45 minutes.

https://www.amazon.com/Ultrasonic-Dual-Mist-Humidifier-Exchange-Filter/dp/B000O3I2CG/ref=sr_1_6_acs_twc_TWC370_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1512683425&sr=8-6-acs&keywords=humidifier&tag=ospsearch-20&ascsubtag=TWC370

We had an Aprilaire whole house humidifier installed on our furnace several years ago and I think it helped. Ours has a thermometer attached outside to automatically adjust the indoor humidity so the windows don’t get condensation on them (and then mold). The downside is that it can still be fairly dry in the house - say 35%, because if it got more humid we’d get the condensation. If we didn’t have it, the humidity would get below 30% for sure. You can always forgo the thermometer if you want.

Make sure it gets installed to the hot water supply instead of the cold water supply. The first installer said it didn’t matter, but it does. Cold water doesn’t work as well. I had to get mine switched.

There is a water drain tube that leads out of the humidifier that does get moldy. I poor bleach down it every once in a while. If you get once check to see if there are any tubes that are able to resist mold growth.

Another thing to consider is if you want it to automatically turn on the furnace blower when the humidity is too low, or just to run the humidifier when the furnace turns on due to a heating call from the thermostat.

Our new house we moved to has a humidifier installed on each furnace. Awesome I thought! I don’t need to install any. We notice it’s pretty dry this winter - lots of static shocks, dry throats in the morning, dry skin. I have an HVAC person come and check them out. The first humidifier isn’t installed right. We have 2 heat pumps + 2 gas furnaces. When the heat pump gets a call for heat, it doesn’t turn the humidifier on. Only if the furnace goes on, which it doesn’t do frequently.

He gets that rewired and then finds out the humidistat doesn’t work anyway and won’t open the solenoid so water can get to the humidifier. Then he tells me it’s not worth fixing because the bypass humidifiers are undersized for the house and won’t provide enough humidity anyway. I check online and yeah, their capacity is too small for the house.

Since it is so dry here he recommends a steam based whole house humidifier from Aprilaire. Installing two fan-powered evaporative humidifiers is really stretching the capacity of them for our house and climate. I am a bit apprehensive because the steam-based ones use a lot of power. I read many reviews of people saying their electric bills in the winter have doubled and gone up by $50-$100 per month. That is quite a bit.

Hopefully we get some solar panels soon so the electricity usage doesn’t matter so much.

We had simple humidifiers attached to our furnaces in Michigan and in Chicago. They were the simple kind with the wet pads of some kind that rotated and had to be replaced once in a while, but made a huge difference in the house. And didn’t have any impact on the electric bill.

I’d heard people say it is bad for the vents to have that humidity going through them, but in the summers I have to believe the humidity was at least as high as what we had the humidifier set to - I know the house humidity was measured that high,

Even though we’re living down south now, I want some kind of humidifier in our house. In the winters, even though it doesn’t get cold for long, our house gets really dry and my ankles and lower legs itch so much it drives me crazy and keeps me from sleeping.

In the South as well. Currently two relatively small stand-alone humidifiers (6L capacity) work for the 2-3 bad months of very dry cold weather. Really just one in the bedroom if you’re willing to close the door at night will work the trick. Because I work from home I keep one near my work area as well.

I know very few people down here with whole house humidifiers.

That is the kind we had in our last house and they did help. I got the steam one installed today and it took the humidity from 27 percent to 41 percent in less than 4 hours, so that was nice. I’ll have to see how much it affects our electric bill. It’s pretty much a desert climate here so we need something that can handle it. Without the humidifier it usually got down to around 19% overnight.

My dry skin just started itching while reading that.

Yeah, it’s pretty darn dry. Sometimes we wake up and it is so hard to swallow because our throats are so dry. Even my eyelids are itchy sometimes!