Revised:
March 26th, 2020
Marc: What we have here is an Aprilaire humidifier. Now there's three different types of humidifiers. There's what's called a bypass humidifier. There's also called a fan power humidifier, and there's also something called a steam humidifier for larger applications. Now the Fire & Ice comfort advisors clearly know which ones are best for whichever application and all three of them can be put onto your system. Now when we talk about humidifiers, they're a pretty simple product. A, as we all know here in Ohio in the winter it gets cold and it gets dry. We've all suffered from, you know, itchy skin and dry skin. Uh, you know, bloody noses and your reach to the knob and the door and you get a shock from the doorknob and your, your poor animal is just shutting like crazy. And the danders everywhere. All of those are caused by lack of humidity.
Marc: Human beings feel two things. We feel temperature and we feel humidity and it's very important that we stay within a certain parameter. You know, a humidifier really does four things. It has benefits that, uh, for health reasons, it has benefits for energy savings. It has benefits for comfort and has benefits for protection. So let's look at protection. For example. You know, our homes are made of a lot of wood and one of the problems with wood as a hydroscopic product is wood dries out tremendously in the wintertime. You know, doors kind of get a little cattywampus. The kitchen cupboards don't line up very well and that's because that wood is being dehydrated, if you will, by the dry temperatures, which is something that a humidifier absolutely solves. Now the second one is, let's talk about health. Um, do you ever notice white people get cold and fluids so much in the winter months and they don't get cold and flu is in the summer months?
Marc: Well, here's the thing, there's just as many germs in the summer is there are in the winter, but in the summertime there's something in our nose and our throat called mucus membranes. Now a mucus membrane is covered with mucus, which is, well our kids all say it. It's that word. S. N. O. T. well that's a liquid if you will. So what happens in the summertime is when we breathe in the germs, it gets caught in the mucus. Well, our bodies end up swallowing mucus in the acids in our stomach, get rid of it and destroy the germs. Now in the wintertime, it's just the opposite. When it's 13% or 12% RH at your house, the mucus is gone. They literally turn into open blood vessels. That's why you get a bloody nose in the wintertime. So what happens in the winter as you breathe those germs and then they go immediately into your bloodstream and boom, you have a cold or you have a flu.
Marc: Now what a humidifier does is it reverses that and puts the moisture back in the air so that you have a much lower chance of infections like influenza, colds, and flus. Now the other thing we talked about is energy savings. Um, there's two things that people feel. One of them is temperature and one of them is humidity. Well, if I can raise the humidity up in the home, I can lower the temperature, which saves a significant amount of money. So by installing a humidifier in your system, you will be able to keep your house much more comfortable at lower temperatures in the winter time by running the RH up a little bit higher. So there's a significant energy savings. You know, it's said that for every 5% RH you can change in your house, it equates to one degree. Well by changing the RH by 10 to 15% in your living room.
Marc: In the wintertime, it can lower your thermostat by three degrees. And we know that by lowering your thermostat, you save sometimes three to four to 5% on your energy bill. So if you do the math and there's a lot of math there, a humidifier actually by lowering your thermostat a couple of degrees every winter will pay for itself in about five or six years. So it's a wonderful, wonderful product. The last thing we were going to talk about is comfort. The overall difference between having humid humidity in the air just makes us more comfortable. Um, not just us, it's our pets. If you think about there's about 50,000 times as many hair follicles on a pet than there is on us. And when pet skin dry out, there's dander everywhere and Fido shaken and all this kind of stuff. I mean, things like plants dry up, they use a lot of water, a lot of differences there. So a lot of people don't think about their pets, but you know, they really can't say anything about how uncomfortable they are in the winter time. So those are all benefits of an Aprilaire humidifier and they're not expensive. They're simple to maintain, they're simple to install. It's something that our customers at Fire & Ice after putting them in are just amazed at the difference between what happens now compared to what happened when they didn't have one.
