Cool Mist Humidifier Guide

A cool mist humidifier can bring a cooling freshness to your home and keep the ills of winter at bay.

If you wake up with a dry throat each morning and your skin feels dried up and wrinkly, your problem could be low humidity. Dry air is especially likely to be the cause if you and your children get a lot of colds and sinus problems as well.

Low humidity, and the attendant symptoms, is a very common problem in winter when we like to stay indoors with the heating on. The heating dries out the air and the humidity level can plunge to single digits - that's lower than some of the deserts in the world.

So if the inside of your home is like the Gobi Desert, it probably means the humidity level in your home is too low.

Optimum relative humidity should range between 30% and 45% or so. Any higher and it can result in mold and mildew. Any lower and you suffer from dry air.

Dry air has a host of unpleasant effects on you and your home.

First, let's consider the outside of your body.

It dries out your skin making wrinkles more prominent. It causes your lips to crack and your eyes to itch.

On the inside, things get even worse.

It dries out the mucous membranes in your nose, mouth and throat. The result is discomfort, inflamed sinuses and increased tendencies to colds.

What's more, it causes your house plants to wilt and dries out wooden floors and furniture.

What's the solution?

Enter the cool mist humidifier. This is an inexpensive, simple devices that infuses your home with a cool mist that raises the humidity level and alleviates the symptoms mentioned above.

They come in tabletop or console sizes, or you can get a whole house air humidifier which fits into your heating system and infuses your whole home with moisture.

A cool air humidifier is the very model of simplicity. A system draws water from a tank and vaporizes it into droplets. Then a fan blasts the mist out into the room. The vaporizing system can be a simple wick, a spinning plate or an ultrasonic device that uses high frequency sound waves to produce the mist.

Cool mist humidifiers are cheap to run and easy to use. You just need to make sure they're filled with water and clean them every week or so.

Keeping a cool air mist humidifier running all night is a great way to way to wake up fresh and keep your respiratory system in tip top shape.