You woke up one day and suddenly you have a humidifier on your table and you are clueless about what it can help with. Or maybe you are wondering about what else it can help you with. What could this appliance that disperses moisture into the air really be useful for?
Let me start by giving you a quick answer to your question.
Briefly put, What Will A Humidifier Help With? As an appliance designed to add moisture to the air, humidifiers will help with several things. In summary, humidifiers will help with preservation of products and valuables, controlling temperature, prevention and easing of illnesses, air sanitization and improving productivity in various activities.
Many people think humidifiers are only made to help with increasing your humidity in an indoor environment when the air is dry. This is not the case.
There is much more that humidifiers will help with and I have written this post to show almost all the different things humidifiers will help you with. By the time you're done reading this post, I believe you’ll know all the ins and outs of what a humidifier will help with. Let's get started then.
1. Preventing And Easing Illnesses
One of the major things I have found a humidifier will help with is keeping you in good health. They do this by preventing and easing the symptoms of several illnesses.
When your humidity drops below 30%, you become prone to a host of health issues and if you are already sick, your symptoms could get even worse. This is because of the number of ways in which dry air weakens your immune system and allows for airborne pathogens to spread.
If your humidity is too low (that is below 30%) among other health problems, you can develop and worsen the following health issues:
- Influenza
- Dry Skin
- Dry Eyes
- Sleep Better
- Congestion And Allergies
- Throat Problems And Coughing
However, when you run a humidifier and it increases your humidity level to the ideal 30-60% range, the adequate level of moisture in your air does wonders for your wellbeing. If you had dry and flaky skin, over time, your skin becomes more moist and smooth.
I have also seen enough anecdotal evidence of eczema symptoms easing. Then, as shown by enough scientific evidence, your flu symptoms ease and you have less congestion and more productive coughing.
For respiratory issues, your symptoms ease because having adequate moisture in your air ensures your cilia, which help keep pathogens out of your airways, perform at their optimal level.
Besides this, by increasing the number of water particles in the air, humidifiers reduce the number of pathogenic particles floating around your air. Accordingly, they also reduce the chances of you inhaling them and subsequently getting sick.
They do this by making it easier for these particles to stick together while floating, then once they stick together, they become too heavy to float around your air and fall to the ground before you can inhale enough of them to make you really sick.
These pathogenic particles include allergens like pollen and dust and viruses and bacteria, including the flu bug and the COVID virus. Because of their ability to help us fight off such airborne diseases, humidifiers are often used in hospitals to minimize disease transmission and help patients feel and get better faster.
Now, I can bog you down with more details of the mechanisms by which a humidifier will help you keep in good health but I think from what I have said so far, you get it, so I'll stop here and move on to the next point. For more info on this, check out my post on how humidifiers help. There I dive into the nitty gritty on all this.
2. Controlling Your Temperature
The next thing a humidifier will help you with is controlling your temperature. Well, they do not exactly help you control your temperature as an air conditioner does, but they act more in a way that prevents you from getting too cold or too hot. Let me explain.
When it's cold and dry, part of the reason you feel cold is that water evaporates off of your skin really fast to make up for the lack of moisture in your air. As the water evaporates, you also lose body heat, and this loss leaves you feeling cold.
To counter the rapid evaporation and essentially decrease how cold you feel, one solution is to add moisture to your air. When you do this, water evaporates from your body at a much slower rate and, as a result, you feel warmer.
But how do you add moisture to your air? The best way is to use a humidifier and by making you feel warmer at lower temperatures, this is how a humidifier will help you better control your temperature. The warming effect works really well, especially when you use a warm mist humidifier.
However, please note that humidifiers won’t help in this way if your weather is both cold and humid as there is already enough moisture in the air. You won’t feel warmer.
As for keeping you cool, the process is much simpler. A humidifier will help you keep cool by simply spraying cool vapor directly on you. The mist will cool you down similarly as a cold shower on a hot day cools you down.
The warming and cooling effects humidifiers will help provide are not limited to just your body’s well-being but apply to other facets of life, especially in manufacturing.
3. Keeping You Comfortable
I have shown you that humidifiers will help you keep in good health and also they will help you cope with extreme temperatures. These are all key aspects of your general comfort humidifiers will help you maintain.
However, if you are neither sick nor feeling too hot or too cold, sometimes when your humidity level is just too low, you just feel a certain physical uneasiness. Try observing how you feel when your indoor humidity is low compared to when it's in the goldilocks 30-60% range.
I'll bet you will most of the time feel physically better when your humidity is the goldilocks zone. Considering all the discomforts caused by dry air, humidifiers will help you feel more physically and even mentally comfortable by maintaining your indoor humidity level within the suitable 30-60% range.
4. Saving On Heating
As humidifiers will help you feel warmer at lower temperatures, another thing that they will help you achieve is lower energy costs by making your home feel warmer at lower heating temperatures.
You can save money by decreasing your temperature by one or two degrees, and doing this over eight hours can save you up to 1% on your heating bills over a month. A humidifier will also help you save energy when cooling your building using a cooling process called evaporative cooling.
With evaporative cooling, you can save up to 75% on your cooling costs as compared to the common refrigeration cooling approach. You can learn more about evaporative cooling here.
5. Keeping Plants And Pets Healthy
Just as they help humans, humidifiers will also help keep pets and plants healthy. Most pets and plants will fare well when your humidity is between 30-60% however, there are some that need humidity levels above 60% to thrive.
Without enough humidity, many plants will shrivel and die. Pets, especially small birds and lizards, will develop respiratory issues and most pets will have issues with dry skin, causing them to excessively shed dander.
6. Preserving Your Building
When the air inside a building gets too dry, it can cause some minor structural damage. If you have wooden floors and fittings in your home or office space, dry air can cause these to shrink wrap. Without enough moisture, wallpaper can shrink and tear, and walls can suddenly develop unsightly cracks.
However, if your home gets the right amount of moisture, you can completely avoid such structural damage and this is totally something humidifiers will help you deal with. They will ensure materials used to build and finish your space keep their natural moisture and maintain their integrity.
7. Preventing Damage To Your Valuables
Dry air damages your valuables in two ways. By reducing the natural moisture content of your valuables and by causing static which can damage mostly valuables that contain integrated electronic circuits.
So if you collect antiques or you own some books, wooden musical instruments or wooden furniture and you get extremely dry air, because of the material of such valuables, dry air can damage them by causing them to warp and split.
By causing static, dry air can also damage your electronic valuables by short circuiting them when they come into contact with a statically charged object. Such damage can cost you a lot however you can avoid it by just adding some moisture to your air and accordingly a humidifier is one of the few solutions you will come across that will help you keep your valuables safe.
8. Improving Air Quality
Earlier, I described how humidifiers can reduce pathogens and pollutants in the air by making them too dense to remain floating. This is one way they will help with improving your air quality.
Another way they will help is by dispersing disinfectants or sanitizing liquid into your air just as they do water. You simply mix some air sanitizing or disinfecting solution with water and pour this into your humidifier tank as you would with pure water and run your humidifier.
Make sure you get the right disinfectant (#link to Amazon) that’s safe for your pets and indoor plants and for humans. With the right disinfectant, you will kill pathogens and neutralize various pollutants in your air, and by so doing, keep your air clean.
The type of humidifier that is most effective for this is actually called a fogger, but you can use a typical humidifier that’s designed to simply disperse moisture. Maintaining good air quality is yet another thing humidifiers will effectively help you with and if you compliment them with air purifiers, you can achieve superior indoor air quality levels.
9. Improving Productivity In Various Household And Business Activities
The last thing on my list of what humidifiers will help with is improving productivity in several activities. These activities are mainly business activities.
In the beauty space, humidifiers help speed up the adhesive curing process when beauticians are doing eyelash extensions and you can also use your humidifier in this way when doing lash extensions at home.
Then if you have a grow tent, or you are a hobby or commercial mushroom or weed grower, humidifiers will help you boost your yields and growth rates by providing your plants or fungi with adequate moisture for them to thrive.
If you run a data center or server room, researchers have found humidifiers to be a useful low energy way of cooling your server room and also preventing damage by static (ESD) to your servers.
Humidifiers have also been found effective in maintaining the integrity of materials and machinery in the packaging and printing industry. For more on all the industrial applications humidifiers help with, check out this post.
With these 9 things, I have now taken you through all the key things a humidifier will help you with. I hope I have now eased your curiosity, but if I have not, please do ask in the comments below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
If you’ve gone through this post and you’ve seen how useful a humidifier can be and you wanna look into getting one, before you decide, make a pit stop by my recommended humidifiers page to get an idea of what kind of humidifier you should go for and which ones are among the best you can get.
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