Anyone have experience with home humidifiers? I have seen some weird behavior with my "large room" humidifier that I'm using until I can figure out a whole house solution.
I had the room humidifier set to 40%, because the wood floors I had installed (Vegas... yea.) specify minimum 35% humidity. At that setting, the humidifier was able to keep the downstairs area with the wood around 35% using approx. 2 gallons of water a day (refilled the 1 gal reservoir twice each day). The upstairs bedrooms settled down around 28%, so I put a smaller humidifier in the master bathroom near an A/C intake and that bumped the upstairs areas to around 30%, using just under a gallon a day.
For reference, the outside humidity has consistently measured 16% plus or minus a couple of percent, for the last 6 months regardless of temperature, and even when it rains it only seems to increase to 30-40% during the rain and then drops back down to 16%.
So the weird part - some of the wood flooring in a high traffic area split after just a few months, so I figured I'd try to increase the humidity. I increased the humidifier setting to 45% and changed out the "filter" evaporation medium to make it more efficient as it bumped up the overall humidity. It ran nearly constantly for 2 days with about 4 gal a day instead of 2, but then... The downstairs settled in and stabilized around 40%, upstairs stabilized at 33%, and water use in the humidifier DROPPED to 1 or 1.5 gal per day. It's held like that for over a week now including through the current heat wave, even though the outside air is 115+ deg and still 16% humidity and the inside air conditioners are running a lot. So its holding the humidity 5-8% higher, using half a gallon less water per day.
What's going on? It's very strange.
BTW, I haven't gone with a whole home humidifier yet because the AC units are both in the attic, and we get hard freezes a few times each winter so I can't put the humidifiers in the attic. The Honeywell truesteam unit has a 20' feed hose that MIGHT be long enough to mount the unit inside my laundry room and run the hose up to an AC duct, but it's really close to a 20' run and I won't be able to measure it exactly without chopping a hole in the ceiling and actually running a wire or string for an exact measurement. The install will run over $2,000 for the unit, a drip pan with overflow cutoff sensor, and the help of a plumber to make sure the plumbing is done *right*, so I'm taking my time making sure I don't buy a bunch of expensive stuff and hire an expert to help me install it, only to find that the run is too long for the steam feed hose.
I don't seem to have any other options. I haven't found a "room" humidifier that can be plumbed into under-sink water supply for a permanent installation, and I'm really not enjoying having to fill the stupid humidifier tanks 2-3 times a day. The truesteam one seems to be the only one that can be mounted remotely with a long enough feed hose...
