Powerful and reliable, humidifiers are available to help increase humidity for dry areas. To the average person that lives in a region with very little humidity, the meaning of the importance of humid air for basic bodily functions might be something one does not understand. For instance, severe throat dryness can happen in your arid air could lead to intense coughing fits and dehydrate your throat for breathing.
Dried up skin can cause cracking up, especially around your lips, a dry nose can cause nosebleeds and dried eyeballs can cause irritation. This can happen especially during the summer months and also if you live in those regions, where it’s generally hot and the air is dry.
Humidifiers are used to add moisture into the air so that you can have well functioning airways, eyeballs, and skin that is not dry and crackly. Today, we will examine how humidifiers can be used for combating sleep apnea and how humidifiers might make life a little easier for babies.
Like all technology however, using a humidifier comes with some risk, and we are going to break down that risk and figure out ways to reduce it in this article. It will come in useful when you go about to purchase such a humidifier.
Benefits of Using a Humidifier
Humidifiers are known to add moisture to dry air which gives myriad of benefits. These include:
- Warming the house: a well-functioning heater will be keeping your home warm during the colder months, but did you know dry warm air can actually feel cold. The additional weight of the air in your home, resulting from adding moisture to the air from a humidifier, makes your house warmer. The good news is that when you do use a humidifier instead of turning your heater up all the way, the correct humidity level will leave your home comfortable and not overly hurt your electric bill.
- Moisturizing your skin and lips: Since there is little humidity in the air, your skin dries out. Natural dryness or artificial heating can reduce the moisture level in your home’s air therefore causing this. When your skin feels tight, especially on the face and palms, you know it’s dry. Additionally, humidifiers add water to the air, therefore, your skin gets rehydrated. Therefore, you can’t and shouldn’t always rely on skin moisturizers to deal with skin dryness, so your humidifier is your friend. We all know the importance of well moisturised skin and how it helps you very much with your comfort in a day to day life and preventing premature aging.
- Plant protection: humidifiers are good for house plants as well, yes. Moisture is heavily relied upon by plants to work properly. This leads you to have plants with wilting leaves and stunted growth. This includes the moisture in your humidifier, which keeps plant leaves soft and if you remember your biology class, the moisture is used to provide the plant with food and help it grow.
- Wood protection: Some wooden furniture is not cheap, and some people do not want broken or cracked wooden furniture if not aesthetically pleasing. The wooden furniture and floors of your home can also be damaged by lack of moisture, making them look abandoned and wasting your money. Purchase a humidifier to combat all that. This prevents the grain in the wood from splitting and helps to keep the wood grain together at the right level of moisture in the air.
Humidifier Benefits for Snoring and Sleep Apnea
One of the most common sleep disorders, unfortunately, it is rarely diagnosed because it is only symptomatic when you are asleep. If you have sleep apnea, you have a breathing pattern while sleeping that sometimes pauses. These pauses can occur up to 30 times an hour and will lead to you getting a restless and uncomfortable sleep. Caused by blocked airways, these can be sensed when someone gasps in their sleep or snores. In more dangerous cases, the airways are completely blocked so a person can suffocate in their sleep.
This phenomenon involves humidity. If the humidity is low, the moist mucus in your nose and air passages become dry, which makes it hard to get air into your lungs as air becomes stuck in several crevices in your airways. When air gets stuck in your sinuses and bounces around, they vibrate making snoring happen to release this air.
Since air requires something to dissolve in and travel seamlessly through your air passages, you need moisture. A humidifier releases moisture that mixes with mucus in your airways, thus facilitating a smooth passageway for mucus and therefore a smooth breathing process. Filtrated air and air with little moisture gets stuck in sinuses as sinuses are not lubricated by mucus. That is to say that you will breathe better, not snore much, and can sleep better and longer if you use your sleep apnea therapy machine.
But too much humidity can be disruptive to sleep. You will be sweating on your sheets, which means you are getting warmer, and you are in a high humidity room. This is the most uncomfortable feeling and you will find yourself tossing every now and then in search for a cooler patch of bed. For that, you must know the optimum humidity that would release just the right quantity of moisture that can keep your bodily functions lubricated without overheating your body and sweating excessively.
Benefits of Humidifiers to Babies and Children
Our little buddies also like humidifiers as well as we do. Even our little ones will benefit from having a humidifier in child’s room or in the whole house. If your skin is sensitive to dryness, then a baby’s skin will be even more sensitive. It can also be quite a shock for an infant's system, accustomed to the moist atmosphere of the womb, to come out into dry air.
Regardless of whether they are getting the dry warm air from your heater or the cooler air from your AC, your baby’s skin is gonna feel that and respond fighting that dry air by getting as dry as the air and flaky if you don’t do something to prevent that. So, before your baby starts developing rashes and will start to cry from discomfort, get your baby’s room a humidifier to keep his skin supple and healthy.
Air moves more slowly through a child’s smaller air passages, which are easier to become congested. It is difficult for them to breathe and if noticed early on it is very dangerous. Humidifiers lubricate and keep baby’s air passages open, making breathing easier.
Leave your child to play in their cot and you can be confident that air will not become clogged in your child's air passages. You don’t have to constantly check up on your little beauty to make sure they’re breathing because you know your trusty humidifier will get the job done at night.
Humidifiers are also wonderful little helpers if your baby develops a cough or a cold, and it works great. A child can have trouble getting cold or the flu as they can’t use most of the medicines you would use to cure your own colds. A parent watching their child cough until they can hardly breathe because of a cold — it’s heart wrenching.
A humidifier warms and moistens the air around your baby, helping the mucus found in his congested chest and nose become liquid, making it easy to flow and ease your baby’s breathing. It's also good for preventing future colds.
Possible Benefits of a Humidifier in the Spring and Summer
Since humidifiers are only used for the winter months when your home heater is on 24/7, it is easy to assume they’re only useful during that time. Nonetheless though, there are uses for a humidifier and these uses are not even confined to the colder season when the winter chill creeps in.
There are only two things people with allergies hate more than bees: spring and summer. Life begins again with spring, the birds return singing in the trees and bees pollinating and plants springing back to life once more after a long dormant winter. In short, you could spend the day by the beach or pool but end up inside all day long with a runny nose.
The mucus helps to keep your sinuses and nose lubricated and free of infection from a healthy flow of mucus. This moisture helps lubricate your airways and keep you hydrated. Furthermore, humidifiers also destroy the germs in the air and trap allergens whose primary goal appears to be to do you in. You can also wave goodbye to itchy eyes and drippy noses associated with the summer months for allergy sufferers with a humidifier.
You believe it or not, humidifiers are in tandem with air conditioners, keeping you cool when the weather is warmer. Humidifiers may not be desirable during the summer because they make the air in your home humid, but they liquefy the dry cool air that your AC pumps into the home to the right temperature for comfortable relaxation.
There isn't any need to crank down your AC to the lowest temperature possible, which will use a lot of energy and increase your electric bill. Having a humidifier to regulate the temperature in your pocket is a good thing for the environment.
Which Humidifier Should You Get?
There are very many varieties of humidifiers in all sizes out there, and it is easy to be confused by the many choices. The basic types of humidifiers are:
- Steam vaporizers which generate steam using electricity. The steam is cooled to the set temperature before being blown out into the room
- Evaporators heat up the water in the reservoir and push air past the evaporated water.
- Ultrasonic humidifiers vibrate at high frequencies, turning the water in their reservoirs into a very fine mist that is blown out into the room.
- Impeller humidifiers have in-built discs that rotate and vaporize the water within.
The EPA suggests using evaporative and steam humidifiers, citing them as being less dangerous for health. Ultrasonic humidifiers vibrate everything within the humidifier, including bacteria, and blow them out into the room.
Impeller humidifiers are child-friendly but might have the same issues as ultrasonic humidifiers if they are not cleaned frequently and the wrong kind of water is used. The URPOWER Essential Oil Diffuser is one of the most loved ultrasonic diffusers on Amazon since it is quiet, good-looking and you can put an essential oil of your choice into it to ease your allergies.
The Pure Enrichment MistAire XL Ultrasonic Cool Mist Humidifier is inexpensive and suitable for areas of up to 500 square feet. This means you can use just one humidifier to moisturize large parts of your home.
Tips for Using a Humidifier in Your Home
- Change your humidifier at least twice or thrice a week. Every day, clean the baby's room humdifier with plain warm water and unscented soap.
- Keep the humidity level below 60% and regulate it. If your humidifier doesn't have an in-built regulator, go buy yourself a hygrometer for this task.
- Because your humidifier reservoir has few minerals it does not stick to the walls of your humidifier, always put clean, soft water into your humidifiers reservoir. Use the distilled water if possible.
Risks to Consider
Any technology has a flaw, and a humidifier does not differ from this. The use of a humidifier has numerous benefits, but it runs the risk of bringing some disadvantages as well. These include:
- Too much warmth: Like animals, although we prefer being warm over cold; so do microbes and other unhealthy organisms like bacteria. This is why most of us fall sick during colder seasons: germs bundle up, too, to stay warm; so do we. Mites and mold love warm, damp areas and, in our homes, it is very easy to get allergies and colds since there is too much humidity. This is why we have to know what level to set our humidifiers at and keep it at.
- Dirty humidifier: You will need to regularly clean your humidifier because it has to. Allergens in your home’s air end up in the water reservoir of your humidifier, and when the steam or mist is blown out, so are they. This simply means their particles are being directly inhaled by you and causes so many health problems. Dirty humidifiers can cause anything from a mild cough to flu to a viral inflammation known as humidifier fever — and, particularly, kids with asthma have a lot to lose. However, you should clean your humidifier at least every 3 days. When you're ready to clean it, just use plain warm water and some unscented soap to clean it, so that you don't blow harsh chemicals out right into your breathing system when you put your humidifier to use next.
- Using the wrong water: yes, this is a thing. Take into consideration the amount of microbes the tap water has that are going to be blown out with the steam from the humidifier. The EPA recommends that you use distilled water for your humidifier because it’s on the safe side. So, the number of possible germs that can be blown out is greatly reduced.
Final Verdict
A humidifier is nothing but a necessity either for the cold season or warm summer months, which means that everyone should have one. Moisturizing your skin, keeping it supple, aiding good air flow in your respiratory system to prevent congestion, and easing colds are some of the many health benefits provided by it.
Babies and children have narrower air passages, therefore, they need all the help they can get to breathe, which is why humidifiers are especially recommended. Humidifiers have uses that go beyond the people as the moisture created is good for your house plants, pets as well as your furniture.
Now that you know both sides of the coin, you can see that, on the whole, pros outweigh the cons. Get yourself a humidifier before the cold really sinks in and enjoy your winter.
