Keeping the air in your home in the right condition is incredibly important. Your home is your safe haven from the outside world, a place where you can control your environment and enjoy the comfort and peace of a secure space.
Humidifiers are an excellent way to keep the atmosphere of your home in exactly the right balance for your health and enjoyment. Traditional humidifiers work well, but automated humidifiers can work even better.
In this article, we’ll look at why humidifiers are so useful and how you can use home automation to create your own smart home humidifiers.
Why home humidification is important
- Stay moisturized. Humidifiers keep the air in your home sufficiently full of moisture, which helps counteract the effects of artificial heating systems. This prevents dry skin — especially on the lips and hands — as a result of dry indoor air.
- Keep your sinuses in good condition. Dry air, over time, can cause your sinuses to become irritated. It’s a feeling most people are aware of and can result in discomfort, headaches, and even nosebleeds. A good humidifier helps avoid this, ensuring your sinuses are lubricated and healthy at all times.
- Make it easier to recover from illness. The right humidifier can ease the path to recovery from illnesses like the flu or a cold by helping your sinuses recover.
- Minimise snoring. A noisy bed partner, over many months, can be the source of much stress and frustration. Snoring is a complex issue that can be difficult to solve, but a good humidifier can often ease the problem significantly by providing enough moisture to keep the throat and nose clear.
Examples of projects
Automatic Humidifier
Living in Boston, Arduino user chenwei19940207 found that the air was so dry, especially in the evening, that a solution was needed. As a result, they decided to develop their own humidifier to turn on and off automatically, ensuring a consistent level of humidity in the air all year round and all day long.
Smart Humidifier
Healthy air has three components — be fresh, clean, and the right humidity. The third factor is important because humans use evaporative cooling (sweating) to rid our bodies of excess heat. This is why humans can be comfortable and safe within a fairly wide range of humidity — between 30 to 70 percent at a push.
But we still struggle at lower levels of humidity. It can result in great discomfort, trouble breathing, and aggravated allergies, and anything below 20% humidity is especially difficult. As a result, it’s best to keep our homes at the right level of humidity.
Recognizing this, Arduino member Md. Khairul Alam developed a project to keep the home sufficiently humidified year round. His device senses the temperature and humidity in your home, checks if it is in the ideal humidity range, and turns on the humidifier to ensure you stay in the right zone.
Arduino Humidifier Control
Arduino “having11” Guy developed this project to regulate the humidity of their home. It involves attaching a dht11 temperature and humidity sensor to an Arduino, letting you modify your humidifier in a way that allows you to automatically turn the device on whenever the humidity in your home drops below a set level, for example 30%.
You also have the ability to set a “cooling down” period, avoiding the humidifier becoming overheated.
NOTE: It’s worth noting that this project uses high voltage and amperage, and doing any of these steps incorrectly could result in serious injury or even death. So be careful and don’t attempt this without any prior experience or skill!
Build a healthier smart home with Arduino
With Arduino, controlling the humidity of your home is just the beginning. Our Project Hub is filled with examples of home automation projects, using all kinds of technology to make their homes smarter, safer, and easier to live in.
Check out our site to find out more uses for Arduino and how you can get started with your own home automation projects.
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