My house gets incredibly dry in the winter. We have a couple of small portable humidifiers going most of the time on top of the one in the furnace. They do help a bit, but its still dry in here. I have a small cast iron kettle and a small pail of water on the wood stove as well. Yesterday I bought 2 × 3 gallon stainless steel pails to keep them company. Its not the nicest looking setup, but its better than burning dry eyes and a sore throat. What (if anything) do you guys do to try and drive up the humidity in your house over the winter ?
Yearly problem here. Pot of water on the stove, and wife will sometimes put a pot on the "other" stove in the kitchen. Bothers her more than I. That usually keeps the RH around 30, which is still a bit low.
I added a whole house humidifier to the hvac. It comes on once an hour an tests the air. If it's low it adds moisture until it reaches the setpoint. It only runs the fan on the hvac. The difference is dramatic. I still have a small humidifier in my bedroom and in the stove room. The whole house one is the way to go in my opinion.
Cast iron pot (a Dutch oven, I think) on top of the woodstove. The key to having it work well enough is to get the water as hot as possible. My container is 3 quarts and I fill it three times a day, not all the way of course, and it seems to be enough to keep enough moisture in the air for comfort. I do not have a humidity gauge of any kind and simply rely on the 'spark test' (getting static electricity sparks as one moves around the house) as the indicator of enough moisture in the air. What basically governs how well a water vessel produces water vapor is the water's temperature (higher generates more vapor) as well as the surface area. So a large, relatively shallow pan on a wood stove will work much better than a smaller but taller container such as a kettle for example. So something like a large aluminum turkey baking tray, though ugly, will work much better than a kettle, pot or any other smaller type of container. Same thing goes for more containers; three kettles will work better than one kettle simply because you get more water area. Brian
Two pans of water on the wood stove, if it gets little to dry I will boil some on the kitchen stove or fire up the humidifier, I don't like the humidifier very well, I'm trying to heat the house and it's blowing out cold air.
Not using the bathroom fan during a hot shower adds a lot of moisture. I even switch the (electric) dryer vent to "indoors", I found a screen assembly made for this purpose to go on the hose...it has a summer and winter setting (damper door) This puts moisture into the basement, but with a wood furnace down there it ends up helping with the whole house.
It works really good, pretty noisy on high though, I never set it there. This is the one I have Welcome to Sears.com - Sears They have the manual on there you can check that out. It's not huge but it isn't little either Check out the cost and availability of new Wicks before you make a decision to buy one
I had a humidifier on the hvac in my old house, but not the new house. I like the idea of it coming on hourly to test and then adjust as needed, since my AC is forced air, and the heat is water, and hopefully wont be on much. It killed me last winter it was so dry in here, I would stuff up something terrible at night. My mother was emptying her house before selling it, so I asked if she had any humidifiers. She came back with two small ones from my sisters' old rooms. One was a cow, and the other a frog lol. I put that frog right next to my side of the bed much to my wifes disdain, much better sleep. Somehow it disappeared this summer though.
We have water on the stove which doesn't really do much but my wife does laundry usually twice per week and likes to do most of the drying using the wood stove heat. This really adds much humidity to the air and we feel it is enough that we don't do anything more. Besides, it surely saves a lot on the drying bill as she runs the drier only on a few things just at the end of the drying so it will make some of the clothes a bit softer.
