When we were living in Montana, we’d visit family in Florida during the children’s spring break each March, and stepping off the plane felt like stepping into a steam room. Not only was the heat a shock to the system, but the humid air made it feel all the more oppressively hot. It would take us almost a week to acclimate.
So why it surprised me when a technician recently told us our house in New Hampshire felt so cold because it was so dry? Is absolutely beyond me. Old homes are notoriously dry in the winter, and as it turns out, the dry air is not just irritating to your nasal passages, skin, and antique furniture….it actually makes the house feel colder than it is! For those of you who also didn’t know this and are blowing through heating fuel because you’re constantly nudging up the thermostat, this may be welcome news. Particularly during this brutal winter, when energy costs have also risen sharply.
The ideal humidity levels for your home are between 30% and 50%. When we first tested ours last January? It was at 17%. And the solution? Is pretty darn simple. Here’s what our technician recommended we do. First, he had us order humidistats from Amazon. We ordered a bundle of three—they sit on a table (or stick to a wall), measure both the humidity and the temperature of a room, and run on a battery (which we haven’t changed yet in over a year). We live in a small, antique cape and were able to simply place one upstairs and two downstairs to get a good read of our situation. But you may want and/or need more. They’re very inexpensive either way.
The second thing we did was purchase two free-standing humidifiers. You can also purchase a whole-house humidifier for your furnace if you don’t want these things hanging out in a room with you for the winter months. We have a whole-house unit in our family’s upland house, and its twice-annual maintenance is actually part of the annual contract we sign for HVAC system maintenance. So to us? It’s no fuss—out of sight, out of mind. In our full-time, historic home, we wanted to skip the expense of adding this new functionality to a very old system, so we simply purchased what was recommended to us, and we’ve been SO much more comfortable.
It has also cut down dramatically on the sinus pain related to dry winter air, which, if you know? You know. We need to run our units set to the middle of three operational levels to see any significant benefit (Level 1 is not high enough) and to limit refills of water to once per day (Level 3 tipped us to two refills a day). Whatever you buy, you want to be certain it’s easy to clean and easy to refill. Our units are both. The only drawback of the models we purchased is that they have a rather bright, digital panel that, honestly, is a bit much at night in a bedroom.
But we’ve never again had to raise our thermostat past 69* and in fact, dial it back to 64* at night. So that’s a big improvement for us over prior years. We keep the humidistats in place to monitor both the humidity and temperature, and have found that even with some extreme swings this year? Things have remained pretty steady for us.
So, before you crank up the furnace on the next frigid day? Think about checking your humidity first. It can make an astonishing amount of difference.
Shop Related Products
These are the humidistats we purchased. I’m actually going to recommend a different brand of humidifier that comes VERY highly recommended; you can read the reviews for yourselves. And I’ve included two models; they differ a bit in terms of appropriate room size and digital controls, but both are, again, very highly regarded. Finally, I’m also throwing this Boroleum on the site. It helps treat dry nasal passages, because even though you can now improve the indoor humidity with your stellar new humidifier knowledge? You still need to step outside into this crazy weather, and it hurts! A great friend told me about this stuff years ago, and it is THE best. It saved us when our son suffered from repeated bloody noses during the nights in Montana. We could buy it at our little drugstore there (where the air is bone dry year-round), but it can be tough to find elsewhere. It’s like lip balm for the inside of your nose.
