Do You Need a Humidifier This Winter?

Winter can be brutal. The air is cold and dry, and the dryness only gets worse with heaters. Many homeowners only focus on warming up their house without any thought for humidity levels. However, cranking up the heat has the unfortunate side effect of leaving your indoor air feeling drier. It’s not that uncommon for people to experience dry skin or throat, some breathing problems, and other symptoms due to the cold winter air or the heating. So how can you make your home more comfortable for your whole family? The key is to have the right amount of moisture in the air in your house. Having a humidifier can solve this problem. In some cases, when the temperature hasn’t dropped that much yet, you can get away with only running the humidifier with no heater.

Why Does Your Indoor Air Needs Humidifying During Winter?

Dry air really becomes a problem in the winter because the temperature of the air will affect how much water vapour the air can hold. As the temperature gets warmer, the amount of water the air can hold increases. On the other hand, the colder the temperature, the drier the air is as the amount of moisture decreases. Using a heater in your home will only make it worse, because when you heat air, you are increasing its water vapour capacity, but its moisture content does not change. When air gets warmer, but the moisture content stays the same, the humidity of the air decreases, which results in air feeling dryer.

Why Should You Care About Dry Air In Your House?

While you may think that discomfort is the only issue you’ll have to deal with, and that getting a humidifier may not be worth it, the truth is that dry air can actually cause more serious problems to your health. Dry air can cause dehydration, respiratory issues (asthma, sinusitis…), or irritate your skin, eyes, nose, or throat. If you’ve ever wake up with a sore throat, and then as the day goes on it feels fine, the dry air you breathe while you sleep could be one of the causes. On the other hand, a good level of humidity in your home can help reduce some symptoms of allergies or even respiratory issues you may be experiencing.

How Does A Humidifier Works?

There are different sorts of humidifiers, and they all use different mechanisms to moisturize the air in your home. Most likely, your humidifier will be one of these: evaporative humidifiers, warm mist humidifiers, or ultrasonic humidifiers. The evaporative humidifier pulls air through a chamber containing a soaked wick to increase the moisture content of the air. The warm mist humidifier will boil water and release the resulting saturated air throughout your home. Finally, the ultrasonic humidifier’s vibrations create small water droplets that are then introduced into the air. Essentially, all of these humidifiers work by pulling in air, adding moisture, and releasing the air to raise the humidity in your indoor air, making your home environment much more comfortable!

Dry air is a part of our Canadian winters, and if you’ve experienced some of the symptoms of a dry home environment, then it might be worth investing in a humidifier. It could even end up reducing your energy bill! When humidity is lower, you may feel like the temperature is colder than it actually is. So having a humidifier can mean less heating, and thus lower energy bills!