Honeywell HE360 Series Fan Powered Humidifier Repair Help

Hi, I'm Jay, and this is the Honeywell whole house humidifier.

On a regular basis, we get questions about "Why is my humidifier leaking?" There are lots of possibilities. So if you have water, that is trickling down the end of this pipe, that's normal. That's supposed to happen. But that should only happen when the humidifier is supposed to be running.

So that would be the furnace blower is on, and the humidistat is set high enough, to force the humidifier to run, both of those things happening at the same time, you will have water trickling down this drain. If you have water pouring down the drain, that's another story. There should not be a huge amount of water, this will be a trickle. For a normal operation. Huge amount of water, that is a problem with the orifice which is located right here.

Periodically these orifices will wear out, and enlarge to the point where they will feed too much water in. If that happens, well then you're going to need to replace the orifice. Or the solenoid valve. If you have a situation where there is water dripping, from the solenoid valve itself, the body of the solenoid valve, the valve is failed, you need a new solenoid valve.

If you have water dripping from this connection right here, which is the water inlet tube, right in here, you can try tightening it up, if it fails, you'll want to cut this fitting back, unscrew the brass fitting here, cut the tube back about an inch or so, put a new ferrule on it, put it all back together, and reconnect it. If you have water dripping out of the humidifier body itself, the cabinet, ok, let's say it's pouring out of here or something, there's lots of possibilities.

The first thing I would look at is the volume of water that is being fed to the top. So, at the top here, you have this feed tube that comes from the solenoid valve, it should be trickling water up into this. If something goes haywire with let's just say the orifice, and it's feeding too much water, it could potentially just flood this area, just overflow this water distribution tray and just cause water to pour out here. And then of course, it would miss the drain at the bottom, and run into the cabinet, and leak out onto the floor.

So, if you don't have that, if you look at this and there is just water trickling in here, and everything is going fine, you can potentially have a crack in this frame. So if the frame was cracked over in here for instance, then water would leak out here, that's a problem, and you'll replace the frame.

Um, another thing that is quite common is the drain being plugged. If this drain hose were to go somewhere and have a kink in it, like we have a very short piece of drain hose here, that goes into this 3/4 inch pipe, but if we had a very long piece of this, and it ran behind the furnace and got a kink in it, and it plugged up so the water level just rose up here and overflowed, well then you're going to have to deal with your drain line.

One of the other items that happens is there's a drain spud here sometimes and it will get cracked, if someone tightens the hose clamp too tight, that's another issue. The pad is another problem. If you have not changed your pad every year, and let's just say you forgot, and six years later you take a look at it, this pad could potentially be a piece of concrete. And if it were, you could have water potentially pouring all over the place out of this pad and sometimes into the duct work. So that's another potential issue that we've seen in the past. Through this tube here, the feed tube.

The feed tube itself, will eventually get hard. Right now it's kind of rubbery, and soft. But over time, this thing gets attacked by the chemicals in the water and also the heat from the furnace. And it will get hard and brittle and crack. So you could have a hole in this and water will be squirting out of this hose. And just flying around inside the humidifier.

So there's various things to look at, if you have a water problem, but like I said, especially with water that is leaking out of the side of the cabinet and the humidifier itself, or water pouring into the duct work, you're going to want to pop the cover off and look inside. And study the thing to find out just exactly where the water is coming from. And that's it, thank you very much.

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

Transcript Humidifier Troubleshooting - Water Not Running

Hi, I'm Jay, and today we are going to diagnose a humidifier that has water continuously running down the drain. First thing we're going to do, is turn off the water and the power.

Be sure to turn the power off before performing any maintenance. Before performing this service it is necessary to shut off the water. Find the saddle valve, turn it clockwise, until it stops.

This is a Honeywell bypass style humidifier. Here's the bypass duct coming around, to the return air duct. Let's take the cover off this thing and look inside. OK, now that we're inside you can take a look inside and see this damper. On the outside there's an indication, summer/winter. Right now it's in the winter position, which is open. That's summer position, which is closed. So, open, closed, we're going to want it open in the winter position.

Now, the water comes up through this tube, through an orifice. The purpose of the orifice is to meter the volume of water, that goes up into the humidifier and across the filter. So, this is metering the volume of water, then you have a solenoid valve which opens and closes, and allows the water to flow through it, the water flows out of the solenoid valve, into this black rubber hose, up the hose, into the water distribution tray, through the tray and down through the humidifier filter, whatever does not get evaporated, down the drain, and you'll find it trickling down through this hose.

OK, so the orifice sends in just a little more water than can be absorbed, the rest of it goes down the drain. Now, that water that is going down the drain, the other thing it's doing is it's cleaning this humidifier filter. So, excess water cleans the humidifier filter, goes down the drain during normal operation, you'll see water trickling down the drain as it's running. You should not see water trickling down the drain when the humidifier is not running.

If the problem you are having with your humidifier is that the water keeps running, there's some simple tests you can perform to determine what the problem is. The first thing to do is turn off the electricity to your furnace and your humidifier. The next thing you can do is disconnect one of the wires, going to your solenoid valve.

Now that we have one of the wires disconnected, we are certain there is no electricity going to the solenoid valve, at this point the valve should be closed, if for some reason, water continues to run, then you have a bad solenoid valve. That is a common failure on these valves, and it can be easily repaired by simply replacing the solenoid valve.

The solenoid valve itself operates on 24 Volts, AC power, and again, it's easy to replace this, it's just a matter of unscrewing it, turning off the water to this line, disconnecting this, disconnecting the hose from the outlet, putting a new valve in and then reconnecting it. Electrically, and also the water in and out. It's a simple repair, and you can do it yourself.

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

It's important when ordering parts for your humidifier, that you first determine the model number of the unit you own.

On this particular humidifier, there is a sticker down here, located next to the solenoid valve. Now, on other models, it might be located on the side or the top. So you're going to want to get a flashlight out and look very closely at your humidifier, find that sticker, and you can determine what model that you own, so you can order the right parts, the first time.

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

Hi, I'm Jay. And today we're going to talk about doing the normal routine maintenance on a Honeywell whole house humidifier. Depending on the model of your humidifier, it can be mounted in several locations. One of them is the return air duct here, it can also be mounted on the plenum up here, where ours is. Ours is side mounted on the plenum. There's another option which is mounted on the duct work, we don't really have any horizontal duct work here to show you, but it could be mounted under the duct work. So those are the three possible locations. This particular model happens to be a bypass style.

The power styles are very familiar, they just have a fan on them and no bypass duct, but the maintenance is basically the same, now the first thing you want to do before you start working on this unit is to turn off the power to the humidifier, the furnace, and also turn off the water. Find the saddle valve, turn it clockwise, until it stops.

Now that the power is turned off, let's take the cover off of this thing. Unscrew it, and lift it off. While we're in here, we're going to take a look here, this is the bypass damper, right now it's in the winter position, which means it's open. There's the summer position, closed. So you're going to want to make sure that is placed in the winter position, when you go to use this thing. The water goes up this little black hose, to the top. So, we're going to pull out the pad, and remove the hose. Ok, so now we have the pad frame, and pad in our hands. The next thing you need to do is disassemble this, we're going to throw away the pad, this is a once a year occurrence, so every 12 months, or more often, if you have really bad water, you're going to want to replace this pad, and then you're going to want to clean these other pieces up. They get all scaled up over the course of time, and it's nice to get them nice and clean before you're ready to get it running again.