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| BARRY FONE MUSIC |
| Save money on your heating bill, breathe better and give the wife a break from dusting - install a humidifier in your home |
| that happens to be in the air. With no moisture to weigh it down, dust flies everywhere and gets into places you never thought it could get into. I'm constantly taking apart my test equipment and spraying the controls, and there's no such thing as a fresh loaf of bread here because it has already lost a lot of its moisture from the factory to the grocery store. Wooden furniture cracks and we have sore noses. On a scale of 0% to 100%, "normal" is roughly 35% to 65%. This is the area that people find most comfortable. Above 65% it's probably raining or getting ready to rain, and below 35% is considered very dry. My area of Arizona stays at around 20% or lower, which is extremely dry and uncomfortable. I've learned a lot about humidifiers from my 25 years in Heating and Cooling, and have torn out and installed hundreds of them in duct systems. Aside from the dryness and dust factor, the level of humidity in the air has a strong effect on perceived temperature. Basically, moist air feels much warmer, and dry air feels very cold - even though both are at the same actual temperature. In fact, raising the humidity from 20% to 50% makes a formerly "too cold" environment uncomfortably "warm", and appears to raise the temperature by about 10 degrees. That's quite a change, isn't it? This means that by installing a humidifier, you can reduce your heating bill by a significant amount. A humidifier uses a little water, which is generally much cheaper than electric, or even gas heat in almost all cases. There are two basic types of humidifiers - one that mounts somewhere onto your furnace ductwork and is connected to the water line, and the other is a stand-alone unit that you have to fill with water every day or so. Both of these types have some drawbacks that disqualify them for use in my situation: The duct mount type introduces water directly into the ductwork, for even distribution throughout your home. You can imagine what water can do to thin steel duct over the years - RUST! I've torn out many old duct systems, and I have found some ducts literally flaked away and fallen apart. And this is the BETTER scenario, with the humidifier mounted on the supply side of the ductwork, AFTER the blower. Unfortunately, the more common mounting scheme is on the return side of the ductwork, where there is usually more room to mount it (on many systems, the "return air drop" is a long, vertical duct that is perfect for mounting the humidifier. In fact - on many systems, this is the only mounting option). This means your humidifier is not only pumping moisture into your ductwork, it is also pumping it directly into the blower motor. This obviously results in rust in the motor, accompanied by a shorter lifespan. To have a company come out and replace the motor is usually about a $300 to $400 job - ouch! The alternative to a duct-mount unit is the stand-alone type. The drawback to this approach is that it will only humidify the room in which it is located. Also, you have to keep filling it with water. |
| My mad-scientist humidification system |
| This is a rather involved project and somewhat extreme, but it should combine the best of both types of humidifier while eliminating most of the drawbacks: I plan to run a water line under the house to each room, then design some type of long, narrow nozzle to feed the water evenly across the top of a swamp cooler pad, which is generally only 2 inches thick and can be mounted close to the wall and out of the way. As the water trickles down the pad, a window fan will blow through the pad an introduce moisture into the room. There will be a water valve in each room, wired to a humidistat so that room's humidifier will turn on and off as needed. Since a large fan on low speed will create less noise than a small fan at high speed (most humidifiers have small, noisy fans), I can simply modify a cheap window fan for this purpose. The result should be a room humidifier no more than 6 inches wide, which can then be installed in a place out of the way. This project is still in the beginning stages, so check back from time to time - I think it will work! |