1137 Fan Powered Humidifier Repair Help

Hi, I'm Jay, and this is the General Aire 1137 Fan Powered Humidifier.

So one of the questions we get from people each year, is "Hey, I can't get my humidifier to run." So, we're going to talk about the peculiarities of this particular model. So, right now, it's plugged in. So the first thing you'll want to do is unplug it, and plug something else into that exact same outlet. Something like a lamp. And basically what you're trying to do is verify that there is power going to that outlet. So, we've gone ahead and done that, and we do have power here, to the outlet. So we know that the outlet is good. So we're going to unplug the lamp, and plug the humidifier back in.

Ok, now that our humidifier is plugged back in, we're going to take the next step. The humidifier is still not running. It's plugged in, we've verified that there is power there, we have the furnace running, we have the humidistat running as high as possible, and nothing is happening. So the next step is to just bypass the humidistat right here. So we're going to take these two little yellow wires here coming out of the humidifier, and we're going to short them out to each other.

Ok, perfect. The humidifier came on. So, you can see the little fan in here is running, and shortly there will be water trickling down the drain here. So, the problem is not with the humidifier, it's upstream. So either the wires are going to these two little wires here, this thermostat wire, brown wire, either there is a problem with it, on the way to the humidifier, I'm sorry-the Humidistat. Or the humidistat itself is faulty, or there is some other item in the wiring circuit, that is bad. So if you jump it up here, and the humidifier comes on, the problem is uphill. The first place I would go, is the humidistat. Find these two wires here, in this case it's a red wire and a white wire, find them on that humidistat, and it should be, if you have a mechanical style humidistat, there will just be two screws on it and you're just going to want to juggle that out, if you juggle that out, and the humidifier runs, the problem is the humidistat. If that doesn't solve it, there is some other problem between the wiring, between here and the humidistat. There is a possibility. You may have some other sensor, or relay or something in the ciruit, that is faulty. But the problem is not with the humidifier.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay, and this is the 1137 fan powered humidifier.

One of the questions we get each year is, "hey the water doesn't seem to shut off to my humidifier." So, we're going to talk about how to diagnose that. So right now, this humidifier is unplugged. So, it's unplugged, nothing should be happening right now. However, if you look, you'll see that there is water trickling down the drain. There is no power to the humidifier, so there should be no water trickling down this drain. The only possible problem here is the solenoid valve right here is stuck open. Ok, so if this is what you have, is when you unplug your humidifier, no matter what happens, water continues to trickle down the drain, you need to replace the solenoid valve.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay, and this is the General Aire 1137 fan powered humidifier. One of the questions we periodically get from clients is "Hey there's water leaking out of my humidifier, how do I fix it?" So I'm going to go over some of the basic things that happen.

So one is, if there is water leaking right here, this is the fresh water coming from your home, that feeds into the humidifier itself. So if it's leaking right here, probably this nut just needs tightening so get a couple of wrenches out here and just gently tighten this a little bit. If that does not solve the problem, then I would shut off the water, cut this pipe here, about an inch down, and put a new nut on it, a new furle and put it all back together because that's probably what's going on is the compression fitting has failed. So that's the one issue.

Another is up here. So this is called the feed tube, so if it starts to leak here, usually that's just a matter of tightening this little fitting right here, this little brass nut, so just tighten that up just a tad and see if that makes the problem go away. As we go up to the top here, anoter possibility is water leaking from, this is called the water distribution tray, and there's a cap on top of it. If for some reason water is leaking from under this cap here, then the distribution tray is getting filled with too much water. Now, there's a couple of possibilities for that. One would be if the pad itself would be completely plugged up and it's just like a brick in there and the water has nowhere to go, another would be if the distribution tray which has multiple holes in it, if it were to be completely filled with calcium, and again, the water had nowhere to go.

The last, but not least, possibility is there's just way too much water going up this tube. So, if for instance, right in here is an orifice, it's hiding inside of this brass fitting, so if this orifice were to fail, and be missing for instnace, and it just allowed a ton of water to go through the valve and up to the top here, the distribution tray potentially could not be able to feed all of that down through itself, and water could potentially rise high enough up inside of here to leak out and stop it. So if that were to happen and if you were to pop this cover off and it were just overflowing with water, you're going to want to find out where all that water is coming from, if it's too much water, or if it just has nowhere to go, because the pad is so plugged up it's directly beneath this thing it won't take any water. Because it's just turned into a brick.

Last but not least, would be down here. Every once in a while we'll get people calling and they will say "hey there's water leaking out of this seam," that's between the drain pan and the bottom of the unit. If you have a problem with that, usually that's either caused by this drain being plugged up, so if I were to just squeeze this drain shut here, and no water were able to go through it, the water would rise up the tube, fill up the drain pan, and overflow out this edge here, the seam. So what you're going to want to do, is the first thing is check to make sure this drain is flowing properly. This one here on the demo unit we have a nice clear drain so it's easy to see if it's flowing or not, under normal operation when it's running, you'll see water trickling down this thing. If you see this thing is completely full of water, it should never be like that. So if it's completely full of water, that means the other end of this thing, is plugged up. Now, ours happens to be sitting inside a piece of 3/4 inch PVC pipe, so it would be obvious on our application, if that happened. But if you had this hose here, let's say it was a 15 foot long, and it was running across the floor in your basement, potentially it could get crimped or stepped on or plugged or something like that, and water would just rise all the way up to the top, fuel up this drain pan, and then overflow at the edge. So that's the first thing you'd want to check, is this pipe here empty, or is it totally full of water. If it's not totally full of water, and it's leaking out here, that's something else. So let's talk about that.

There's a humidifier pad in here, and if you leave it in there too long, it's supposed to be changed once a year, minimum. So let's say, you forgot. And you left that pad in there for 5 years. And that pad turned into a brick. Well, the water has nowhere to go at that point, and potentially overflow that pad and could leak into the cabinet itself. And then potentially leak out on this seam here. So if you have it leaking out of the seam, and this tube is not full of water, it's empty like this, just a trickle in it. But there's water trickling out of the seam here, I would shut this unit off, take this drain pan off here, take a look at the pad, and see what's going on with it. Because you're probably going to find that the pad has turned into a brick. And those are the common leakage problems.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay. And this is the Generalaire 1137 fan powered humidifier.

It's been around for a very long time, and all the various versions of it across the years look basically the same as this. There is another style that is a newer kind of look, that is the same as this, but it looks a little bit different, and all the fan powered and Generalaire humidifiers basically act the same. When they're running, you'll see a fan if you look inside this little grill here, there's a tiny little fan inside of there little fan blade, and it's spinning right now, that's just to cool the motor itself. There's a larger fan blade that we can't see, that's hiding inside of the box here. And what that fan blade is doing, is it's sucking hot, dry, air out of this furnace supply plenum, it's drawing that air through the humidifier filter, it's then picking up moisture in the air, and that humid air is being blown back into the duct work so that's kind of cycling the air. Taking air out of the duct work, humidifying it, and dumping it back into the duct work. Now, during normal operation, the furnace will be running, and the humidistat is also saying, "hey I wan't humidity," so when those two things are happening at the same time, that should enable the humidifier to come on. And when it runs, the little fan inside of here will be spinning, and there will be water trickling down the drain. If for some reason you have water trickling down the drain, the fan is not running, and the furnace is not running, there is a problem. It shouldn't be happening. So, normal operation again, the furnace is running, the furnace blower is on right now, the humidistat says "hey I want moisture," this fan inside of here is running, and water is trickling down the drain.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay. And this is the Generalaire 1137 fan powered humidifier.

It's been around for a very long time, and all the various versions of it across the years look basically the same as this. There is another style that is a newer kind of look, that is the same as this, but it looks a little bit different, and all the fan powered and Generalaire humidifiers basically act the same. When they're running, you'll see a fan if you look inside this little grill here, there's a tiny little fan inside of there little fan blade, and it's spinning right now, that's just to cool the motor itself. There's a larger fan blade that we can't see, that's hiding inside of the box here. And what that fan blade is doing, is it's sucking hot, dry, air out of this furnace supply plenum, it's drawing that air through the humidifier filter, it's then picking up moisture in the air, and that humid air is being blown back into the duct work so that's kind of cycling the air. Taking air out of the duct work, humidifying it, and dumping it back into the duct work. Now, during normal operation, the furnace will be running, and the humidistat is also saying, "hey I want humidity," so when those two things are happening at the same time, that should enable the humidifier to come on. And when it runs, the little fan inside of here will be spinning, and there will be water trickling down the drain. If for some reason you have water trickling down the drain, the fan is not running, and the furnace is not running, there is a problem. It shouldn't be happening. So, normal operation again, the furnace is running, the furnace blower is on right now, the humidistat says "hey I want moisture," this fan inside of here is running, and water is trickling down the drain.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay. And this is the Generalaire 1137 fan powered humidifier. The summer shut down procedure on this consists of turning off the water, so find your valve, shut it off, and unplugging the humidifier. Now, there's a plug on the end of most of them, but if yours happens to be hard wired in where you can't unplug it, go to the humidistat, and set it to the lowest possible setting.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay. And Today I am going to talk about one of the most common questions we get every year is, "how do I set my humidistat for my humidifier?" so, right here is our demonstration unit, and we have two humidistats here.

The one that's installed, is an automatic style. Which is a fancier type, it's digital, it's a nice display, it will raise and lower the humidity setting, based on how cold it is outside. The colder it gets, the lower it will set your humidity to. the purpose of that, is to stop your windows from fogging. If it's very cold outside, it brings the humidity way down because if you keep it where we'd really like to keep it, which is about 45%, you'll end up with windows fogging and frosting, and potentially damage your home from that. So, even though we'd really like to have 45%, year round, in most applications, you can't really get there without damaging the home. So, in the bitterest part of the winter, this unit will automatically take the set point for humidity and go from 45% and just keep lowering lowering it lowering it, until it's compatible with the temperature outside. So, it does that automatically.

Now, this is an analog or mechanical style humidistat. This one is much more common and this one you kind of just turn the knob here, and you have to do the thinking if you will, because it doesn't look at the outdoor air temperature, so it has no idea what the outdoor air temperature is. so, we have a little chart, that kind of gives us the suggest set points, and I'll talk about that a little bit later, but basically with this one, you kind of set it somewhere around the middle or so here. And, you see how that works for your house, if the windows begin to fog up or sweat, you just set the humidity a little bit lower, and give it a couple of days, if that's still not low enough, you go a little lower, and you give it a couple of days. As winter starts to fade away, and it gets warmer outside, you can go back here and start raising this thing slowly. And until you get to where you're comfortable, you can have kind of a happy mix between comfort in the house, and the windows not fogging up. So, that's what you need to do with these. Again, 45% is ideal. But you can't really set it at 45% in most homes, when it's zero outside, because your windows will fog.

So, we're going to set this on the side, alright, so let's talk about this automatic one, because it has some really nice features. Ok, this humidistat is in the auto mode, it says that the humidity in the duct work here is 38% and the plus sign in the droplet here means that it is calling for humidity, so, the humidifier is running right now. If we take a look at this button here, which is the temperature. We can see that, this duct work, here, the temperature inside that duct work is 81 degrees Fahrenheit. If I press the button again, it says the outdoor air temperature is ten degrees Fahrenheit. So, the outdoor air temperature sensor, which we have done some movie magic to, right now, it's saying it's, well it's just changed, now it's saying it's 11 degrees Fahrenheit, and we have 38 percent humidity in this return air duct work right now, where the sensor is on this. And it is calling for humidity. when you install this humidistat, you need to tell it what type of home you have. So, that is done here, with these little arrow buttons in automatic mode.

Ok, so we're in automatic mode, which means we have an outdoor air sensor installed, so we want to tell this what kind of home we have. There are ten possibilities here. So, it's done by pressing one of these buttons down here. Ok, right now it says, 10 is a set point, and we can change it all the way down to 1. And the reason behind that, is an older home with no insulation, will have a tendency to sweat. The windows will sweat, and potentially moisture will develop inside the walls of the home, if the humidifier is set a little too high, and its extremely cold outside. So, on an older home, you basically have to set the humidity a little lower than you'd like. with a newer home, you can set the humidity higher, than an older home. So, there are 10 of these. And it's based on five different types of homes, basically 1 and 2, either one of those are a good setting for a home that is older than 1950, with no vapor barrier, and little insulation. A 3 or 4 setting, is designed for homes built between 1950 and 1965, with no vapor barrier, and R6 insulation. A setting of 5 or 6 is for homes built between 1965 and 1975, with a craft vapor barrier and an R11 insulation. A setting of 7 to 8 is for homes built between 1980 and 1990, with craft vapor barrier and R19 double pane windows. And finally, a setting of 9 to 10 is designed for homes built after 1990, ipoly vapor barrier, R38 insulation, foam exterior cladding, and triple pane windows. So, those are the general parameters. If, for instance, you have a home that was built in 1950, but, you had all of the windows replaced, with let's say, triple pane windows, and you had all of the walls insulated, so you've remodeled your house dramatically, and you've basically made it a modern home, but it was built in 1940 for instance, you will be able to use a much higher setting, here, in these parameters, than you originally could. so the higher the setting, the better the insulation in the home, the better the windows, and what will happen is it'll tell this humidistat that "hey i can tolerate higher humidity in the house." Ok, so let's go back to this analog style, or manual style humidistat. That has the knob that you spin here. You'll notice that there are no numbers on this particular model, there are no numbers between 75 and 10. You have to kind of guess at it. The recommended settings, just, so you're kind of aware of them, these are typical of the average home. If it's 40 degrees outside, a setting of 45%. If it's 20 degrees outside, a setting of 35%. If it's 0 outside, a setting of 25%. So, as you can see, the colder it gets outside, the lower they want the humidity set point set at. It sounds kind of backwards from what you would think, because if it's really cold outside, you'd think you want it to be really humid inside, and that would be great, the problem is that most homes, you will potentially have issues with windows sweating, even potentially moisture condensing inside the walls, and those are all bad things, so you have to kind of strike a compromise between what would make me perfectly comfortable, which would be about 45%, typically for most people, and what's going to stop my home from sweating, and those compromises are typically made here at the humidistat. So, again, the colder it is outside, you want to lower the set point. So, we have the average temperature outside, on a week is, let's say 20 degrees outside. You want to try for about 35% as a setting, and you don't need to be messing with these everyday, but if you have a mechanical style stat, like this, you might want to go there and try and tweak it, maybe, every couple of weeks and try and get it again where it's compromised between you are comfortable in the house, and the windows aren't sweating, that's all you're trying to do is stop the windows from sweating.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.

Hi, I'm Jay, and we get some questions on a regular basis about "hey what is that thing attached to my furnace?"

So, we have our demonstration unit here. And let's just talk briefly about what all of these bits and pieces are. Ok, so right here, this is the return air duct work. So this duct work goes from inside of your house, to the furnace, and this takes all the hot air in the summertime, and the cold air in the winter time from your home and brings it to the furnace to be heated or cooled. So this return air duct, the air travels down the duct, in this case. It makes a turn, and happens to go through an electronic air cleaner, this is an Electro-air electronic air cleaner. Goes into the furnace to get heated or cooled, comes back out of the furnace; this is a cooling coil here. So if you have air conditioning, you'll have one of these sitting on top of your furnace. So the air would then blow through here, and out the duct work and back into your home. Now, this one has a couple of other accessories aside from the Electro-Air Electronic Air Cleaner. So there's a GeneralAire UV System in this particular unit, in our demo unit. You may or may not have a UV system, but if you do, they are commonly installed here it can also be installed inside of the plenum. This one happens to be a return air style. There is also a humidistat. This humidistat controls the humidifier which we will talk about in a minute. So it also has that, and it has this little water saver device. Which is an accessory that GeneralAire makes that you can have it on your system or not, they're not real common but in our demo unit we have one here. So, we get over to this side here, up inside here we have a GeneralAire bypass style humidifier. They are often found bolted to the side of your furnace, they can be bolted here, they can be up here on the supply plenum, the other place these can be located is over here, on the return air duct. Sometimes people put them here, I prefer to have them over there, but if you don't have the room sometimes they'll be located in this position. And that's about it, that's al the bits and pieces that are associated with the modern heating and cooling system.

Thanks for watching! For additional help or questions, feel free to contact us.