What can I do about dry heat in my room?
August 18, 2011 by darn
Filed under Darn Meaning
It’s winter time folks and that means the heat is on. Only, that this heat is SO DRY and I wake up with a dry mouth. My skin feels dry and my contacts are sticking to my eyeballs because it is so dry. What can I do about keeping the heat on and not it being SO gosH darn dry in here?
Put a container of water on top of the radiator.
Get a humidifier!
Pitchers of water sitting around will help.
Some plants will too.
If you have radiators put a wet towel over it before you go to bed(DO NOT DO THIS IF IT’S AN ELECTRIC RAD OR IF THERES ANY PLUG SOCKETS UNDERNEATH THE RADIATOR) I do this and it works well for me.
A vaporizor works well for a single room, if you want to get some moisture into the air quickly, and consistently (and they don’t cost much). You can find vaporizers at any drug store, or department store.
Small containers of water placed near vents will help too…..
If you’ve got room where you won’t step into it, (or a pet that might tip it over), another method I’ve used, is to take a shallow baking pan, set it near a vent, where the air will blow over it, and then take a pot, or bowl of water, and stretch a cloth, or towel (even cotton diapers will work for this – preferably clean of course, lol), so that part of the cloth is in the container of water, and then is stretched out onto the shallow pan. It helps if you can keep part of it up into the air, where the vent will blow on it. The cloth will ‘wick’ the water out of the bowl, as the air blows over the cloth, putting the moisture into the air. Playing with the size of the cloth will let you vary how much moisture you put into the air. You can also do this with a fan, and not just your heat vent…. let the fan blow over the cloth. I’ve taken wire clothes hangers and bent them to fit, so that they hold the cloth in the air, and clothes pins to attach the cloth to the ‘wire frame’ too. You’d be surprised how much this will help, and how often you’ll need to refill the water container.
I’ve had problems with nose bleeds due to dry air, since I was a kid (a long long loooonnnnngggg time ago, lol), and so I’ve gotten pretty good at putting together a quick, cheap, moisturizer over the years, hehehehe.
As others have mentioned, if you’ve got steam radiators, you can drop a wet towel over the radiator, but I’ve found that they tend to dry out, just by themselves, so again, I use a small cooking pot with water in it, to keep the towel moisturized.
If you need to put moisture into the air for the whole house – a quick fix is to boil some water on the stove. Hhehe – just don’t forget that it’s boiling, or you can have a mess if you boil the pot dry, hehheh. When I was a kid, this was the preferred method my mother liked to use – tho she tended to forget about it, and would burn the pot dry. We used to tease her about being such a good cook, she could burn water, lol. One place we lived, had a lot of sediment in the well water, and boiling the pot dry, would leave all that sediment baked onto the pot, hehheh.
If you want to spend a little bit of money, you can get a humidifier large enough to moisturize 2 or 3 rooms, or even a whole house. The advantage to these machines, is that there is a control on it, where you can set how much moisture content you want in the air, and it will run automatically, much like setting a thermostat to control the heat.
Humidifiers can even be fitted into the furnace duct, if you’d prefer that method, then it’s completely out of sight.
Good Luck