The Humidity of it all

I am wondering how folks keep humidity in their homes during the winter months.

Increased humidity during the cold season can be beneficial. It helps with dry skin and stops static shock and static cling in clothes. Additionally, wood, leather, and other textiles benefit from having a little moisture in the air. If things become too dry, your woodwork and leather can crack or the paint might peel.

Mostly, though, humidity helps your sinuses. My husband and I both have sinus troubles, and regular readers know I also have asthma. Both conditions benefit from increased moisture in the air.

A hydrometer, available at any hardware store, will measure the humidity in the air. Humidity below 40 percent is considered low, but humidity above 50 percent is too high.

If the humidity is too high, you run the risk of mold growth, particularly if you keep the house heated at 70 degrees or more.

You can increase the humidity in many ways, and I think we have tried most of them. Low tech methods include leaving pots of water sitting around and letting that evaporate into the air. Wet towels will do the same thing, though I think you run the risk of mildew doing that. You can put a pot of water on the stove and let it boil, or place a kettle on the fireplace or woodstove and listen to it whistle.

Controlling humidity has been a battle for us for several years. When we built our home in 1987, we installed a whole-house warm steam humidifier. It worked rather like the toilet bowl in that it had a ball valve that lowered as the water in a little tank lowered. We had a humidistat on the wall and would set it for 40 percent and viola, we had humidity throughout the house.

The only thing we had to replace on this humidifier was the heating element. We cleaned it regularly because we have hard water, but after a few years it would corrode and we'd need another.

You can guess what happened. Eventually we could no longer find the heating element. Without that crucial part, the whole-house humidifier became useless.

Several years ago we replaced it with the newer version of the same thing. Alas, it was no longer the excellent product it was initially. It had a computer chip in it. It wouldn't work with the old humidistat on the wall, and it never seemed to regulate with the humidstat that it came with. We would set the humidity for 40 percent and the thing wouldn't turn on. We would set it higher and it would come on and saturate the house with water, which of course was not desirable at all.

We sent it back to the company several times for repair and work, but it never worked properly. I didn't trust it and would not go off and leave it running for fear I'd come home and find water oozing out of the heating duct work.

We looked at other whole-house warm mist humidifiers but decided that, in light of the fact that the new models all have been "improved" to the point of uselessness, that we would go with portable units in the house.

I bought an expensive warm mist humidifier for the bedroom, which we used successfully for two years, along with occasional use of the whole-house humidifier to subsidize it. Then the portable unit started leaking.

So I bought another portable unit for the bedroom, a different kind because of course the one I had purchased before was no longer available. This was a cranky appliance; it used mineral pads to keep down mineral deposits and if they were not situated exactly so on its little spot, it wouldn't run. It also required distilled water, and we were using over 10 gallons a week. I was glad when its water holder developed a leak, too.

Meanwhile, the whole-house unit became so unreliable that using it at all became out of the question. So we turned it off forever.

Two years ago, we bought a large cool mist humidifier. We put that in the hallway, and used a small, cheap warm mist humidifier in the bedroom. That worked well and we were able to control the humidity levels.

Cool mist is evaporative humidity, but the humidifier uses a fan to force the moisture into the air. Warm mist creates a steam. Warm mist is actually better for sinus conditions, but it heats the water.

All of these units require daily cleaning and a weekly maintenance routine. I'm not going to say I did it every day, but I think I was as diligent about cleaning the machines as most people would be. Maybe more so because, with my allergies and asthma, I really needed for the machines to stay in proper working order.

This year we again used the large cool mist humidifier. The weather here has been tricky, and it's been dry and warmer than normal. I've had a difficult time keeping the humidity at a good level. We switched to a small cool mist humidifier in the bedroom, too, mostly because it would use tap water and not distilled water.

In both of these, we used a humidifier cleaner product to keep down bacteria and mold.

After the new year, my asthma kicked in. It seemed I could breathe better outside and away from home. I couldn't find the problem. Something in the house was bothering me. I looked everywhere for mold or dust. I watched my diet to see if I was eating something I shouldn't.

Finally, earlier this week, I took a flashlight and peered into the motor of the large cool mist humidifier. Along the ridges of the underside of the fan, down inside where I couldn't reach to clean, and where you couldn't see without turning things upside down and taking things apart with a screwdriver, I saw a bit of mold.

I am highly allergic to mold.

I threw the humidifier outside immediately, and set to work spraying Lysol and checking to be sure there was no mold growth in the area where the humidifier had been sitting.

Whether or not this was the problem with my asthma, I don't know, but it seems likely. This morning, for the first time this month, my peak flow meter numbers (used to monitor your breathing) are out of the "caution you're in trouble" range.

It also is very apparent to us that in order to humidify the house, we may have to purchase new appliances every year. I will not have something that has mold in it in the house, and obviously there is no way to clean every part to guarantee that there is no mold. Purchasing a new item annually seems to be the only way to ensure no mold. But that will get expensive.

So I am curious. Do other people have this problem? And if so, how do you deal with it? Any recommendations?