Home Humidifiers – Evaporators or Atomizers?
Humidifiers come in two types:
Atomizers – This type shoots tiny droplets of water into the air. Almost immediately, this fine mist turns into invisible water vapor, dissolving into the air in your home.
Evaporators – This type blows a stream of warm air over a water-soaked medium, like a rotating sponge, causing the water to evaporate.
Which type is best? Atomizers work well as long as your water supply is reasonably free of dissolved minerals. But if you have hard water (eight grains of hardness or higher is an accepted cut-off point), an atomizer can cause problems. How? By fogging all those dissolved minerals into your air. Once this happens, they fall out as a chalky white deposit, dusting furniture throughout your house.
For this reason, if hard water is a problem in your area, you’ll be better off with an evaporator.
Your next decision is how much capacity you will need.
Humidifiers are rated by the amount of water they can put into the air during the course of a single day. As a rule of thumb, you’ll need about a gallon a day per room to get humidity up to around 40 percent (a good, comfortable level).
Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule. If your home is fairly tight, you can cut that estimate in half. If you live in a drafty old hulk, you may need to double the output to two gallons per room.
How do you get the needed capacity? Well, you can use a few small units, scattered throughout the house. Or you can go with a single high-capacity unit.
I favor this second approach if you can get away with it. A big single unit is cheaper than a bunch of little ones. It’s also easier to run. A big central unit can be hooked up to a water line so it fills itself with water automatically. With a bunch of little units, you have to remember to fill each one by hand, usually every day.
If you have a forced hot air heating system, it makes sense to get a humidifier that works along with the system. Every time the furnace turns on, the humidifier pumps moisture into the ductwork, so it’s fed through the house along with the heat.
I have one of these units in my home. It mounts on the cool air return duct of the furnace, so it’s out of sight, out of the way. It’s also just three feet away from a cold water pipe, so hooking it up to the plumbing was fast and easy.
If you do decide on a furnace-mounted humidifier, have your furnace man make sure your heating unit is not oversized. If it is, it will run so infrequently that it won’t get a chance to humidify effectively. In that case, you may be able to down-rate the furnace. As a welcome side effect, this will make it more efficient.
If you don’t have a forced-air system, you can still use a large console-type humidifier, hooked up to a water line. Try to place it in a central location to help distribute the moisture evenly throughout your home.
However you choose to humidify, once you do, you probably will be able to save on your heating bills. Remember this old summertime cliche: ”It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”? Well, the same moisture that makes you feel hot in the summer can help you feel warm in winter.
Once your humidifier has been running for a couple of days, try lowering your thermostat a degree or two. If you still feel warm after a couple more days, drop it another degree. Keep this up until you reach the lowest comfortable setting. A drop of just two or three degrees will probably save you enough in heating costs to pay for the humidifier in a season or two.
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