How to Humidify Your Home Cheaply

Do you suffer from chapped lips, cracked skin or nose bleeds in the winter? These may be signs that the air in your home is too dry. If you're on a budget and can't afford to buy an expensive humidifier, here's a low-cost way to boost the humidity in your home.

Buy a Vaporizer

Even the smallest unit is enough to humidify most small houses or apartments. You can find these in most drug stores or your local Wal-mart. I bought a Vicks model for US$17 at Walgreens, for example, and it does a fine job of humidifying our 1,500-foot, two-story house.

Now you may be saying, "Yeah, I bought one of these things but it stopped working after two days." If this happened to you, your experience is not unique. I've heard this complaint many times and, in fact, it happened to me. That's why the next piece of advice is so important:

Use Only Filtered Water

Vaporizers work by boiling water and expelling steam. The reason they sometimes stop working is that users fill the holding tank with regular tap water. Tap water comes with all sorts of minerals and sediments that cling to the heating element, clog it up and prevent it from working properly. Most store-bought water filters, however, strain out these minerals and sediments and keep your heating element working longer.

If you're living on a budget, I assume you don't buy bottled water but filter your water at home (as I do), which is much cheaper. I've used both Brita and Pur filters (which you can buy almost anywhere) to filter water for the vaporizer. In my experience, they both work fine.

The good news about such filters is that you can use them to filter your vaporizer water long after you've stopped using them to filter your drinking water. I have two Brita pitchers at home. One is for drinking water, the other to refill our vaporizer. Every time I replace the filter for drinking water (about every two months), I simply move it to the pitcher used to refill the vaporizer. But there's no need to do it this way (we happened to have a extra pitcher). You can simply use one pitcher for both purposes.

Clean the Heating Element with Vinegar

So you have this vaporizer stored away that stopped working after two days. What do you do with it? Clean the heating element. The easiest way to do this is to soak it overnight in vinegar (with the unit unplugged). The next morning you should be able to scrape off the black gunk with ease and get your vaporizer running again.

You may have to do this periodically even when you use filtered water, but much, much less often than if you use tap water.

Important: Unplug Before Removing Vaporizer Top

In most vaporizers, the heating element is in the top or cover, where the steam pumps out. It is very important that you unplug the unit before removing the top, otherwise the heating element may stop working.

Why this happens, I'm not sure. But I believe that once the piping hot heating element is no longer in contact with water, it fuses with particles in the air, which coat it with gunk. Soaking the heating element in vinegar (unplugged) and scraping the gunk off should get it working again, however.

Buy a Humidity Gauge

To ensure you don't over-humidify your home - which can cause mold growth - I strongly recommend you buy a humidity gauge or hygrometer. I have a small digital gauge I bought at Wal-mart for US$18, for example, which works just fine. Most experts agree that keeping the humidity level in your home between 35% to 45% is safe.