Revised:
March 8th, 2021
What we have here is an Aprilaire humidifier. Now there’s three types of humidifiers: there’s what’s called a bypass humidifier, there’s also a fan powered 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. As we all know, here in Ohio, in the winter it gets cold and it gets dry. We’ve all suffered from itchy skin and dry skin, bloody noses, and you reach for the door and you get a shock from the door knob, and your poor animals are just shedding like crazy and there’s dander everywhere. All of those are caused by lack of humidity. 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 for health reasons, it has benefits for energy savings, it has benefits for comfort, and it has benefits for protection. So, let’s look at protection for example. 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. Doors kind of get a little cattywampus. The kitchen cupboards don’t line up very well. And that’s because the wood is getting dehydrated, if you will, by the dry temperatures. Which is something the humidifier absolutely solves.
Now, the second one is, let’s go to health. Did you ever notice that people get colds and flus so much in the winter months, but they don’t get colds and flus in the summer months? Here’s the thing, there’s just as many germs in the summer as there are in the winter. But in the summertime, there’s something in our nose and throat called mucous membranes. Now a mucous membrane is covered with mucous 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 mucous. Well, our bodies end up swallowing the mucous and 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% relative humidity in your house the mucous 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 is you breathe in those germs and they go immediately into your blood stream and then, boom, you have a cold or a flu. Now, what a humidifier does it reverses that and puts 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. 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 wintertime by running the relative humidity up a little bit higher. So, there’s a significant energy savings. You know, it’s said that for every 5% relative humidity you can change in your house equates to one degree. Well by changing the relative humidity by 10 to 15% in your living room, in the wintertime, can lower your thermostat by three degrees. And we know by lowering your thermostat you can save 3 to 4 to 5% on your energy bill. If you do the math, and there’s a lot of math there, a humidifier, actually, by lowering the thermostat by a couple of degrees every winter will pay for itself in about five to six years. It’s a wonderful, wonderful product.
The last thing we’re going to talk about is comfort. The overall difference between having humidity in the air just makes us more comfortable. 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’s skin dry out there’s dander everywhere and Fido shakin’ and all this kind of stuff. And things like plants dry up that use a lot of water, a lot of differences there. So a lot of people don’t think about their pets but they really can’t say anything about how uncomfortable they are. So those are all the benefits of the 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.
