Aprilaire humidifier question

David Ryder

Here's a silly one, the more so because it's my OWN house. I installed a power humidifier (Aprilaire 700) last season and almost immediately noticed the water not coming through the drain. Opened it up, the solenoid valve was plugged with grit. Unplugged and soldiered on. Next week, same problem. Now, when I fill a clear glass with hot water from any spigot in the house, it's cloudy for about 20 seconds, then clears. New water heater, so I don't know what's up with that. Cold doesn't do it. Using my noggin (watch it) I switched the humidifier's water line to the cold water pipe instead. Wa la, no more plugged solenoid valves.

Since I have a setback tstat that keeps it pretty damn cold during the day while I'm out solving other people's heat problems (50F) and then almost as cold at night (60F) the furnace doesn't run enough to adequately humidify the house anyway, so I wired the humidistat to turn on the blower on low when it wants more humidity. The problem is, with a setting of 35RH the thing runs a LOT. I'm concerned about water usage (and blower wear). Have I compromised the humidifier's efficiency running COLD water through it? I've heard rumors that this might be an issue.

Thanks for listening

Glenn Harrison_2

Two things,

One, all power humidifiers work best when heated air is being pumped thru them, so if you are running the fan with no heat and a call for humiditymost of the time, you will evaporate far less humidity into the air then you would with hot air. So you are likely running a lot of water down the drain when your in setback.

Second, all humidifiers do run better with hot water than cold, as the hot water does evaporate more easily. My recomendation would be hook up to the hot water, install an icemaker water filter in the humid line, and if it's still dry, up the temp on your setback so that your running more warm air thru that 700 during the day.

By the way, I wouldn't worry about motor wear, as every motor rep I've ever tsalked to says motors will last longer when run continuosly than start and stop operation.

Hope this helps, Glenn.

bigugh_4

water heater ?

How hot do you have the water set? water gives up its hard water ingrediants around the 140*F mark. (makes the sand) It may be that you could set it a bit lower than that,and save yourself some frustration. Also water out of faucet above 120*F is scary, as it could scald someone.
bigugh

Mark Hunt

Band-Aid


The fact that you need to add humidity to the house is probably due to excessive air infiltration.

Have a blower door test done and tighten up the home where you can.

You may find that you will need the humidifier no more!

Mark H

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BRUCE AVERY

Humidifier

You will definitely see calcification/mineralization call it what you will when using hot water to feed a humidifier (Your pads will get coated and you will probably see white dust (clean dust as one of my customers called it) throughout the house. The humidifier's capacity is determined by static pressure, water temperature, air temperature. Having room temperature air (especially 50 or 60 degrees) will greatly impair your capacity. First I would recommend that you only use a 6 degree setback temperature anything greater actually consumes more energy because the mass of the house has to be reheated. Second, treat yourself to a more comfortable temperature say 68 degrees (I'm a whimp I use 72). Third, if you insist on running the temp in the house so cold switch to a little baby steam humidifier, we use Autoflo, you can get it at Graingers or F W Webb.

Good luck!

David Ryder

There's an interesting factoid I'd never heard before. Being a geek and living for this crap, I went downstairs and measured the water at the nearest point to the hot water tank. Sure enough, I'm putting out around 140F, and that was at "idle". The water gets considerably hotter just after a shower, during the water heater's recovery mode. Not that I find that scary, but if what you say is true about the water tossing it's mineral content above 140F, perhaps dropping the water heater's tstat setting will eliminate my humidifier's solenoid valve clogging problem.

I lowered the tstat and reinstalled the humidifier water feed on the hot side. If this doesn't improve things, I'll go with the earlier suggestion to install an icemaker filter inline, though replacing a plugged filter every week seems more annoying than cleaning out a solenoid valve.

Regarding the guy who suggested that setting things lower than 6 degrees below normal defeats the purpose, I wonder about that. It takes about 30 minutes of continuous heat to bring the house from 50 to 69, once a day. Seems like that'd have to be cheaper than running the thermostat at 63 all day, but I've been wrong before. Just ask my two ex-wives.

Kevin_12

David

Change your stat to a Honeywell Chronotherm 4 with intellegent recovery. It memorizes the cycles of your home and won't let the temp. drop too far down it set back if it knows it can't get it back. Plus it won't run one long cycle on recovery. You could set back to 55 if you wanted to.
The Honeywell rep told our company that it does absolutly no good or that there is no benifit to having hot water go thru your humidifier. Cold water is absolutly the choice. Also is your Hum. on the warm air plenum? If not then you need to put it there and if you can;t then go with a by-pass hum. Also check out those new self regulating humidistats Honeywell makes.