When the winter season and cold, dry air approach, it means that flu season is right around the corner. Winter weather makes us sneeze and cough while wreaking havoc on our health and making it difficult to breathe easily. Cold and flu viruses thrive in the cold and dry winter air, but having a whole house humidifier hooked into to the home’s HVAC system can drastically reduce your chances of coming down with a winter cold or the flu.
The reason the flu thrives in the winter is because the dry, cold weather conditions pull all of the moisture out of the air allowing the flu and cold virus to linger in the air. At the same time, these weather conditions make virus transmission more likely by drying out the nasal passages. The flu virus has a protective coat, which allows it to travel through the air without being damaged.
As the flu virus enters the respiratory tract, the protective coating melts and does its damage inside the body. Understanding how the flu virus thrives in the winter can help you comprehend how a whole house humidifier can help keep the development and transmission of the flu virus at a minimum.
In the winter, when you run your furnace, you are sucking more moisture out of the already dry air, creating a breeding habitat for the flu virus. To avoid this, a whole house humidifier can be integrated with your home HVAC system, which infuses the proper amount of moisture into the dry winter air. The home is now a less friendly environment for virus propagation.
If you’d like to learn more about increasing your home comfort and reducing your health risks this winter with a whole house humidifier, please feel free to call us at Around the Clock Air Conditioning and Heating. We’ve been proudly serving the entire Los Angeles area since 1967.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Los Angeles, North Hollywood and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about whole-house humidifiers and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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