year-round humidity control
after getting the whole-house dehumidifier installed last year, i've been kind of dragging my ass on buying/installing a whole-house humidifier. i finally bought one about a month ago but didn't get around to installing it until this past week when temperatures dropped and the humidity in the studio got as low as 26% (ack!).
the humidifier i got isn't anything terribly special...just one of those whole-house drum humidifiers you can pick up at home depot. the unit itself is pretty decent, but it was a pain in the ass to install and the whole process was kind of kludgy. it took a little while for it to start working its magic, but after about 3 days the humidity levels are pretty stably about 10% higher throughout the house. i still need to tweak things to get the studio a few % points higher, but overall things are looking good.
my goal is to have the humidity in the house be between 40-50% year round. for the studio this is mainly to help wood instruments behave well, but i also want the humidity controlled in the rest of the house for comfort/health reasons. nothing i hate more than waking up in the middle of the night in the winter feeling like every drop of moisture has been sucked out of me.
when springtime rolls around i'm going to confront the dehumidifier situation again. i'm still really pissed at the way they installed this thing and i believe it's running very inefficiently as a result. in places with both heating and air conditioning, you're always supposed to do any dehumidification before the evaporator coil and any humidification after the furnace. the reason for doing humidification after the furnace is that the increased temperature enables the air to hold more moisture, and the very process of passing air through the furnace drops the relative humidity significantly.
as for dehumidifying before the evaporator coil, i've learned the hard way why this is important. dehumidifiers are self-contained refrigeration cycles--air passes over an evaporator coil where it is cooled significantly, which causes excess moisture to condense and get drained out. then it passes through a condensor coil, which causes it to heat back up. i discovered this summer that the air coming out of our dehumidifier is actually several degrees warmer than the air going in, and since the output of the dehumidifier was tapped into the supply line, that warmer air was just circulating through the house and making the a/c work harder. when spring comes around i'm going to switch it over to the return so that all of the output from the dehumidifier passes through the a/c evaporator coil before going anywhere else. that should also provide better dispersion of the dehumidified air throughout the house--in the current set up, because of where the dehumidifier is tapped into the supply trunk, one end of the house and part of the studio barely get any direct delivery of dehumidified air.