When you pull a fleece blanket off in the dark and all you see is blue static electric, other than being very cool to look at you know you might have a humidity problem.
Our house runs on a heat pump system, which in the summer sucks the hot air out, and in the winter goes into to reverse to suck cold air out. One of the side affects of doing this is that that it also pulls all the moisture out of the air which is a good thing in the summer and a bad thing in the winter.
We have been running a standalone humidifier since last Christmas but the cats were starting to avoid us since they would get little shocks every time we touched them. After being out in a cabin for the long weekend I decided to come home early and install a whole house humidifier. After 2 trips to Home Depot I had a Honeywell HE360A whole house Humidifier and almost everything I needed to do the install. Our house used to have a humidifier and I am not quiet sure what possessed the previous owners to remove it, but it was gone, but they left nice starting holes for fitting the new one. After a couple hours of cutting, drilling, running thermostat cable, spraying my self with water, I had it installed, and the house was sitting at about 30-40% humidity.
The only problem was the humidifier was a running all the time not just when the heat pump was running. After a bit of research I found I needed a A50 24v current sensing relay. Surprisingly this isn’t something that Home Depot or Lowes stock so I had to order it online. It came last night in the mail last night and after some more unscrewing, twisting and rerouting I have it installed and everything it works!
The house is continuing at about 35% humidity, the heating appears to be running less frequently, and the cats are a lot happier. It will be interesting to see how it affects our electricity bill, but we are ever hopeful.
