When wintertime ushers in the cold and flu season, a warm Dayton home may be your safe retreat — or is it? Surprisingly, the dry heat in many homes may actually harm your health, decrease your comfort and damage your furnishings. You can boost your comfort level and improve your indoor air quality by simply installing a whole-home humidifier.
When a forced-air heating system moves warm air throughout your house, it serves up a host of problems, including:
- Static electricity. Static shocks, flyaway hair and clothes sticking to your skin are results of static electricity that results from dry air.
- Damaged furnishings. Wooden floors and furniture may suffer damage in dry homes. When wood dries out, floors and furniture may crack or split open.
- Allergy and asthma problems. The moving air from a forced-heat system stirs up dust and circulates it throughout rooms, which exacerbates breathing problems, aggravates allergies and triggers asthma attacks.
- Dehydration. Dry air from your furnace or heat pump pulls moisture from your skin and causes it to tighten, itch and crack. Breathing in the dry air can also dehydrate your nasal passages and vocal chords. Itchy noses and hoarse voices are the result.
- Illness. Coughs and sneezes expel moisture into the air. Dry air removes moisture from the cold and flu germs contained in the moist droplets, and allows the germs to float in the air until you or a family member breathes them in.
A whole-house humidifier offers a host of benefits to combat these dry-air problems. It attaches to your home’s duct and plumbing systems and adds the proper amount of moisture while removing the excess. Please call the pros at Ace Hardware Home Services, Inc. with any questions you have about installing a humidifier in your Dayton area home. We’ll help keep you warm, comfortable and healthy this winter.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Dayton, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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