In this video we talk about how to use and maintain your humidifier in your
home, as well as how to set it. That's starting right now.
– Welcome to Homebuyer's School,
brought to you by Brookfield Residential.
– Hi everyone I'm Karl, welcome to another Homebuyer's School video,
specifically our homeowner how to's —
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anything. So today we're in the basement of a home in our first of our two part
series on humidity management. I'm joined by Ilana Staniscia with Brookfield
Residential, and we're gonna show you today how to use and maintain your
humidifier. So before we begin Ilana, can you tell us a little bit more about humidity?
– Absolutely. Humidity is a double-edged sword. It can be very good
for your home and it can also be very very bad. Now most of the materials in
your home come from natural sources which makes them very susceptible to
humidity and moisture. With that being said, if you have too much humidity in
your home, you run the risk of warping and bending these materials—and if you
don't have enough, they can split and they can crack. Now since we're not going
to stop using our homes anytime soon, we have to find a way to manage humidity
but it can be tricky because anything as simple as cleaning, bathing, even
breathing creates excess humidity. So this is where your humidifier comes
into play.
– Perfect, let's get started!
– You'll be able to find your humidifier
as it's mounted on your furnace. Above it you'll see the humidistat. This is how
you can control the level of humidity in your home based off of the temperature
that's outside. A good rule of thumb is the colder it is outside, the less humidity
you want inside your home. Down below is the humidifier itself, what this
does is it filters water through the air that circulates through your home. Inside
it is a filter that you're going to want to change every 3 months or so. You
can also clean them, and we'll show you how to do that today. To get started, what
you'll want to do is pop off the cover by locating the top and bottom tabs on
the humidifier. Push down firmly and pull out.
Inside you'll see you have a dial.
This dial shuts off the air flow to the furnace during the winter months. We
recommend to keep on the winter setting, however if you
have air conditioning in the summer you can put it on the summer setting. If not,
leave it on winter all year. Put that upright in order to remove the
filter. Pull from the top and then lift up.
Here's a good example of a filter
that needs to be cleaned. To remove this,
slide off the plastic insert —
and the filter should come out with ease.
To clean this, you can soak it in CLR until
all the calcium has come off. After that, you're gonna want to give it a good
rinse, pop it back into the slide and then you're ready to reinstall. Now that
we've got the clean filter, you can go ahead and reinstall it back into your
humidifier. There's a couple things you'll want to note before reinstalling
it — the first is, you'll want to line up the drain of the filter with the drain
of the humidifier — the second is, a lot of humidifiers do have a water hose, most of
them will be located on top. You'll want to remove that before you even take this
out, and then place it back in once you're done installing your filter. To
put it back in, I like to start at the bottom, line up the drains and push the
top until you hear the click. The click is very important, if you don't hear that
your humidifier will leak. Once that's done, turn your
air valve back to the winter setting —
put your cover back on —
and that's it, you're done!
– So Ilana, how much humidity should I
set my home to?
– You know, it's a personal preference with a maximum to about 30%.
We would recommend however if you're starting to see condensation building on
your windows, that's a dead giveaway that your humidity is too high and you need to
lower it on your humidistat.
– Perfect. Do you have anything else to add?
– Nope. That's it.
– Great—and don't forget to watch part 2 of our humidity management series on
HRVs in the video above and in description below. Thank you very much
for joining us, and remember if you enjoyed this video and found it helpful,
make sure to hit the like button, and remember to subscribe. Thank you and
we'll catch you next time.
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