As it has gotten colder, the air from the heater blowing on me at night has caused me to wake up with a dry throat and feeling dry. I found the solution last night.
It was an air diffuser that cost $24 from a home improvement store. It is metal and I put it on top of the Heater where the air comes out and it is working well. It doesn’t completely cover the entire area of the air vent, but it covers the majority of it and does the job.
When I woke up this morning I felt normal. I didn’t feel the dryness that I had been feeling. I was thrilled. I bought two of them since I have two units. One in the bedroom and the other in the living room/office.
Previous to this I had been using a cheap plastic diffuser that looked terrible and didn’t work very well. I could only direct the air to the window which while it worked, was not as efficient. It looked worse, and it functioned worse, and it cost me money because I pay for the electricity for the heater unit but not the heat itself. A pipe with heat is free and the only cost is the electricity to run the air over the pipe to warm things up.
During the summer the highest electrical bill for AC was about $300. This was because the south facing windows are huge and the AC was always going. Even though I had curtains it was hot. The curtains would absorb the heat. I wrote about this earlier. In addition to inner curtains, the room came with vertical window slats. That blocked out some of the sun as well. I had never lived in a home with south facing windows and they really work well to heat up a space.
I bought additional curtains and the cost of the AC came down to about $150 the next month. It was also an unusually hot summer so that is part of it.
Of course I am trying to live as economically as possible and I know that buying these will help me do that. Sometimes you have to spend money to save it.