Both air purifiers and humidifiers can impact the air that you breathe in your home, but each serves a different purpose with very unique benefits. If you’re looking for ways to help your allergies or asthma, here’s a useful guide on making the choice,
Humidifiers
Humidifiers add vapor or steam to the air, but a downside is that you can add too much. This can be a recipe for disaster: mold, bacteria, and dust mite growth in your home. You must also remember to keep your humidifiers very clean.
Air Purifiers
Portable air cleaners filter the air in a single room, unlike an AC that does that in the entire house. A portable air purifier can’t clean every single pollutant in a home. But, recent studies have shown that using an air purifier can greatly cut indoor pollution in half.
If you suffer from allergies and asthma, you must do a little research and see if an air purifier is right for you. If you live in an area prone to forest fires, or even in a big city with lots of pollution, having an air purifier handy can help a great deal. Along with asthma, problems like colds, flu, and respiratory irritation are also causes for concern. Air purifiers usually capture particles in the air, but some particles carrying viruses are so tiny they can pass through normal air filters. Though air purifiers cannot help an existing cold, they might help ease your symptoms by removing other respiratory irritants present in the air.
An air purifier doesn’t add moisture to the air, so it won’t be of any help with excessively dry air, which can worsen a range of respiratory ailments, such as asthma, bronchitis, and sinusitis.
Wondering if you can use both together? Since both air purifiers and humidifiers perform completely different functions, they can be used together, even in the same room. But you should avoid placing them too close as the moisture from the humidifier could clog the air purifier filters or otherwise limit the effectiveness of it.