Is a humidifier worth it?

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by Deserterer

I can't imagine a gallon a week makes any measurable difference at all, unless your house is one tiny room. My humidifier goes through several gallons a day and its barely enough to keep my first floor at the low end of comfortably humid.

Have to agree. When my small houses get dry enough to cause dry itchy skin, eyes, nose, hair, the portable humidifiers I use (with an incorporated fan to push air/moisture around) burn through a gallon every day or so. I've tried passive evaporative humidifying (leaving an open pan on a baseboard radiator or furniture) in the past, but unless I had multiple pans scattered around found it didn't make that much difference. It actually takes quite a bit of moisture to raise the relative humidity of a room very noticeably, especially at first. All the room's contents and materials need to absorb the moisture before the air will reflect the change. A slow moving fan blowing across the surface of the pan made more of a difference but basically all that did was create a low tech humidifier...not to mention a messier one. The open water surface would just collect dust, pet hair, dander, and spiders .

Because I've usually kept birds, reptiles, and fussier house plants I normally have a hygrometer in a key place in humidified rooms so I know what the relative humidity is actually is from time to time. None of my recent critters demand the tropics, they just don't want the desert of a cold climate winter-heated human house. The hygrometer is better at detecting actual change in RH before I do. Maybe it's the placebo effect, but when the hygrometer reading goes higher everything felt better and I didn't give anyone shocks when I touched them .

[Ariadne22]

Super dry air, static have never been an issue in my house. I live in SE WI, outdoor humidity today 59. This is not the desert. Keep house at 67. Heat vents are close to ceiling, pans of water atop a china cabinet and grandfather clock, both in the LR (20x22) where I spend most of the day. Very helpful in the colder months.

So, no, I am not humidifying the whole house, just one room where I spend most of my time.

At one time had an Aprilaire attached to the furnace. Very helpful back in the day, decades ago, when winters began earlier, ended later, and were much colder.