About 12 years ago, my wife got tired of dry skin and electrical shock due to cold weather in Kansas City. She had a whole-house GeneralAire 1099 humidifier installed on the furnace. It came with a manual H-86 humidistat which seemed to work fine....until we woke up one morning to ice covering the upstairs bedroom windows. True enough, the house felt better that first year or so but the effect seemed to wear off in the following years. Consequently, I'd turn the humidistat to a very low humidity level at the start of winter or just never turned it on. This year, I replaced the H-86 with the automatic, external-temperature sensing SEH-7100-000 from Skuttle which costs about $50. Some aspects of the Skuttle literature are misleading....and almost made me not buy this device. For example, the maximum allowed length of external temperature sensor wiring is 30 feet according to Skuttle. I spliced 18 gage solid copper wire onto the supplied 22 gage stranded sensor wire for a total run of 60 feet with excellent accuracy. The installation manual was equally vague in regard to how the Test Function worked in automatic mode. It turns out that you must connect the sensor for the Test Function relay to close the Output port. The on-board LED turns from RED to GREEN when the sensor is connected....and this significant hint was never mentioned!!! I also elected to power the SEH-7100 using a dedicated 24VAC transformer (10 VA) and power the solenoid valve using the switched 24VAC transformer(40VA) from the furnace. Instead of running sensor wiring parallel to existing 120 VAC house wiring, I ran it perpendicular to house wiring whenever possible.
Overall, this is a great product...despite the literature and installation hint shortcomings. The house seems warmer at lower temperature settings...and we also seem to sleep better at night. This is the best $50 I've ever spent for heating equipment....
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