Humidifier Safety: Fill & Download for Free

Things have changed so much since I’ve my own children it’s a wonder they survived to adulthood. lolNow babies sleep on their backs, with a fan and humidifier on, but no covers.My babies got nothing but the best - a fluffy blanket, with matching bumper pads and they lay on their stomach in case they spit up. In the summer we left the windows open, in the winter we sat closer to the fireplace.There are special car seats that require an engineering degree to operate. They aren’t supposed to be passed down, and even a fender bender requires purchase of a new car seat. Oh, and depending on weight the seat can be turned forward or backward, morphed into some other kind of safety seat.We didn’t even HAVE a car sear when my oldest was born. I padded the floor boards behind the passenger seat (so I could check up on him while I was driving), laid him face down and covered him with a blanket. No fan, but I could roll down the windows.My daughter nearly fainted when I suggested we look for a crib at the thrift store. Apparently, those aren’t supposed to be passed down either. They aren’t supposed to have drop-down sides, you can’t adjust the mattress to be deeper as the child grows. Useless in my opinion.My son was born early. I carried home in my arms, put him down (on his tummy with a blanket) in a heavily corrugated box until my husband could go to the thrift store to buy a crib that, hopefully, wasn't coated in lead based paint. The mattress was on the top clip of the frame, which made it easy to change a diaper and bedding. As he grew older, we moved the frame down to keep him from escaping the crib. By that time I had to be able to let the side down, how else are you going to get the baby outta there?Diapers, oh yes, not only are they new ones disposable, but a line indicates when the diaper needs to be changed. Pretty snazzy.You guessed it, I used cloth diapers - the kind you had to fasten on the moving child with safety pins, which weren’t so safe considering how many times my own finger was impaled. The way I found out the little one needed changing was by smell, or, you ain’t gonna believe this, pull the diaper away from the baby’s butt and and sniff or put your finger in to see if they were wet. Lots of surprises. After removing the dirty diaper, baby’s bottom was cleaned with a wet wash cloth, usually with tap temperature water, which in the summer wasn’t to bad. THEN, we had to dump the contents of the diaper in the toilet, flush, then swish it around in the toilet before putting it in the ‘diaper pail’ filled with water and Dreft soap, it could be no other soap if you truly loved baby.Yeah we actually put our hands IN the toilet. No Diaper Genie, and there was nothing magical about lower body functions. My girls wouldn’t dream of taking their baby’s temperature with anything but a gun that goes into baby’s ear. I used the bulb style mercury filled, rectal thermometer.There are other changes too. No bouncy thing attached to the door frame, none of the round things with wheels for legs that let the baby move around without being able to reach much, starting babies on fruits and vegetable now instead of grain cereals, and so much more. Bottom line, your kids love their kids, the way you loved your kids. Most parent’s do the best they can, and you should do whatever it takes to support, respect and learn from any concerns your grandchildren’s parents may have to share with you. Times have changed grandma.

Question: “Why did some smaller homes from ‘50s have half basements: one half finished for occupancy and the other unfinished crawl space with gravel?Many of the houses houses built in America in the 1950s were starter homes meant to solve the housing shortage created by both the Great Depression, during which few new homes were built, and WWII, during which there were essentially no new houses built, and provide housing for all the delayed families resulting from the post-war marriages.Those houses had to be inexpensively built, for the returning GIs had little savings for a down payment. Yet the GI Bill and the Savings and Loan Associations provided reasonable mortgages. And the good jobs of the expanding American post-war economy and the large pent up demand for housing created a profitable opportunity for builders. Thus, there was a post-war boom in inexpensive small homes.One of the cost saving methods used by the builders of these homes was to build a half-basement and construct the rest of the house over a crawl space. But why did the builders not simply build the house on a slab and eliminate the basement all together?The reason was this.It is a Coal Fired Gravity Furnace. It was, from the late 1800s through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the way American homes north of the Mason-Dixon Line were heated. It was, for obvious reasons, often referred to as an Octopus. It was not a Forced Air Furnace, and thus, had no blower. It used gravity, and the difference in the weight of hot and cold air to bring hot air up to the rooms via the pipes emanating from the furnace’s plenum at the top and take in cold air from floor registers in the rooms through ducts connected to the large diameter return pipes seen to the right and left of the furnace in the above photo.It operated like this:As it operated by gravity it had to be placed below the level of the rooms it heated. Thus the need for at least a partial basement. The heat provided by the gravity coal furnace was even, adequate for even the coldest winter days, and could be augmented by a humidifier built into the furnace. Such furnaces had become the norm for comfort in properly built homes.These gravity furnaces and the pipes and ducts that brought the warm air to the rooms and returned the cold air to the furnace had to be physically large. They could not hide them in a closet.If the house were built on a slab, which would have been cheaper, the alternative would have been either wall-mounted electric radiant heatersor kerosene furnaces.The electric heaters provided limited and very uneven heat, leaving the floors and much of the room cold. Moreover, they consumed a lot of then expensive electricity. The kerosene heaters were unsightly, extremely smelly, and occupied a lot of precious floor space while heating only the room in which they were installed. Both, especially the kerosene heaters, were associated with cheap housing and were undesirable.Gas wall heaters were also employed, albeit in parts of the country with moderate weather and minimal heating needs.These offered only localized radiant heat. But the major problem with gas wall heaters is that many of them were “ventless”, that is they did not vent their combustion gases through the wall to the outside. As such they could present an asphyxiation hazard.Thus, the desire for winter warmth created the necessity for builders who built homes for the returning soldiers and their new families in the booming economies of the northern states to provide at least partial basements in order to accommodate the physically large gravity furnaces which in the early 1950s were still the American standard for home heating.Many of those gravity furnaces were later fitted with large external blowers converting them to forced air furnaces. These blowers were larger than a large washer or drier. Many coal furnaces had automatic stokers added,such as this Iron Fireman, which eliminated the need to shovel coal from the coal bin into the furnace. Later many coal furnaces were converted to burn fuel oil with oil conversion units.And later, when the low BTU manufactured gas which had been used for cooking was replaced by natural gas which had a much higher BTU from interstate gas pipelines, more octopuses were converted to natural gas.But it was the large demand for new housing in the post-war years, the need to both reduce the price of 1950s starter homes for returning GIs, the profit motive that made building these home where there was greatest demand in the expanding industrial economies of the post war northern states, and the need to provide comfortable heating for those homes that combined to persuade builders to build homes with full or partial basements.Note that, similar to the half-basement, another economy design feature incorporated into many of these homes was to fully build the main floor but to leave the second floor as a framed but unfinished attic which could be completed as additional bedrooms at a later date when the owner could afford it and there were more children. Those houses were all built around the economy of the 1950s which was characterized by a housing shortage, material shortages created by the shift from a war to a consumer economy, returning GIs, a rapidly growing northern economy, a mass move to the suburbs, the GI Bill, Savings and Loan Associations, and a baby boom.Notes on steam and hot water heat: Steam heat was known and used in the United States as early as the first half of the 19th century. Steam heating was, for example, installed in the white House and Capitol Buildings in the 1840s. Steam, and later lower pressure hot water heating, is advantageous for installation in large buildings as the heat can be distributed over long distance through insulated pipes with minimal loss. Steam and hot water heating systems are also suitable for retrofitting in old buildings as the pipes necessary for its distribution are easier to install and disguise in an existing building than the large duct work required for gravity or forced hot air heating systems.But steam heating had a serious disadvantage for home heating. Steam boilers are dangerous. Unless carefully monitored and maintained and equipped with safety valves that are frequently tested, a steam boiler can explode with catastrophic effect. In a commercial building where the boiler is fueled and maintained by a trained boiler technician the risk can be controlled. But the danger of a boiler explosion is serious enough that many steam-heated large homes in the 19th and early 20th century placed their heating systems in separate buildings away from the home. The boilers in the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, North Carolina for example are located underground under the mansion’s courtyard for that reason.Low pressure hot water heat was less dangerous, though boiler explosions were still possible if a valve stuck or if the water level in the boiler was allowed to get too low. But for a small or medium-sized home the installation was costly, the large radiators were unsightly and took up valuable floor space, and the heat distribution could not match that of a properly designed gravity or forced hot air furnace. The very hot radiators needed for steam or hot water heat presented a burn hazard for the unwary or small children.Moreover, the gravity or forced hot air furnace had other advantages. First its duct work could be completely hidden inside the walls and floors of homes during construction. Secondly the hot air furnace heated the air by convection rather than objects by radiance. Thus, one feels warmer and more comfortable throughout the rooms in a home heated by a hot air furnace than in a home heated by radiators. Third, a gravity or forced hot air heating system circulates the air in a home. Fourth, that air can be filtered to clean it each time it circulates through the system. Fifth, the hot air can automatically be humidified at the furnace. And sixth, whole house air conditioning and de-humidification can easily be integrated or retrofitted into a forced hot air home heating system.In the United States where central air conditioning began to be installed in the 1940s and became very common in the 1960s this ability to integrate or retrofit what began to be called Central Air solidified ducted forced hot air as the heating system of choice for American homes. The introduction of very high efficiency condensing furnaces in the 1990s solidly established ducted hot air as the most common heating system in the United States.Yes, there are other systems such as electrically and hydronically heated floors used in private homes in the United States. These are, however, most often used in addition to central forced air in such places as bathroom or sun room floors rather than as primary heating.

No essential oil is water soluble, due to the nature of its composition, which is as you mentioned, hydrophobic. They don’t mix in with water and they won’t dissolve at all.Essential oil diffusers break down essential oils completely down to the particle, which is then mixed into vapour and cold air that’s released by the diffuser.If you can get a diffuser to use along with your essential oil, please do so! While humidifiers can disperse essential oils into the air, nothing can beat the quality and efficiency of vapour that a diffuser is able to produce.Additionally, we should take into factor the safety level of diluting essential oils. Whereas with a diffuser, the oil itself is broken down into particles, mixed in with some carrier oils, and then mixed completely within a vapour.Humidifiers aren’t able to do that. This means that you’re more at risk of experiencing some side effects related to essential oils, especially if you use a large amount to diffuse (which you shouldn’t be doing).Another factor that contributes to this is that diffusers are naturally cold, and humidifiers, warm. The heat generated from a humidifier can be problematic for the integrity of an essential oil, which may mean that you won’t be getting the full benefit of the essential oil.The bottom line is you can diffuse essential oils with a humidifier, but expect better results with a diffuser.