Because dry winter air doesn’t stay in one room, a whole house humidifier is the solution to keeping the indoor environment comfortable for your entire household this season. Winter is known for dry air and the annoyances it brings: dry skin, sore throats, and static electricity shocks. It’s also rough on hardwood floors and even the structure of your home. The Department of Energy recommends maintaining household humidity levels around 50 percent for home comfort and efficient heating. That’s often hard to do because the combustion process in standard furnaces consumes naturally humidified interior air, which is continually replaced by infiltrating dry outdoor winter air.

Stand-alone portable room humidifiers work on a one-room basis, behind closed doors. They require daily water filling and take up floor space. Humidity produced by portable humidifiers often produces a feeling of dampness because the water vapor is not fully evaporated.

Whole-house humidifiers connect directly to your furnace ductwork and disperse humidity everywhere air circulates in your home. Controlled by a central wall-mounted digital humidistat, the system continuously senses the humidity in the home and maintains it at the desired setting. Present humidity levels are displayed on the humidistat’s LCD screen and on-screen prompts make altering settings as easy as adjusting your thermostat.

Whole-house humidifiers come in two designs:

  • The drum style unit incorporates a rotating drum covered by a spongy water-absorbent material. As the drum turns it passes through a tray of water, then rotates into the flow of warm air from your furnace. Moisture evaporating from the drum is conveyed through the house
  • Panel style humidifiers cover a finely perforated aluminum panel with a thin layer of water. Exposed to warm air from the furnace, the water instantly evaporates and is dispersed into the airflow in the ductwork. Panel humidifiers require less maintenance and use less electricity.

In Wichita, Comfort Systems provides residential and commercial heating, air conditioning and plumbing sales and service. Call us about installing a whole-house humidifier to keep your whole family comfortable this winter.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Wichita, Kansas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about humidifiers and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

Posted in Humidifiers and tagged , , , , , ,