Ever feel dried out after waking up from a night of using your CPAP machine? Sleep apnea therapy dries out your nasal passages and throat because pressurized air is pushed through the airway. A humidifier added to your CPAP treatment prevents these experiences by providing a little additional moisture to the air from your CPAP machine. Today, CPAP Central will discuss why humidifiers can help in your CPAP therapy and what the differences are.
There are three different kinds of humidifiers used for CPAP therapy:
- Cool Passover Humidifiers – This machine uses room temperature air to pass over the room temperature water in the humidifier chamber.
- Heated Humidifiers – This machine heats the water in the chamber as the air moves over it, picking up the humidity and heat, and then delivering it to your airway.
- Waterless Humidifiers—Right now, this can only be found with the ResMed AirMini Travel CPAP machine. It captures the heat and moisture from exhaled air and uses it to humidify therapy air.
Any of these options eliminate the sore throats and dry noses that you have experienced in the past. Humidifiers can also resolve congestion issues as well as decrease the amount of nasal resistance that lead to mouth breathing and leaks.
A CPAP humidifier can be built-in, integrated or a standalone machine. Some of the differences include:
- Built-in humidifier – This component is designed to be a part of the CPAP machine and cannot be removed or separated.
- Integrated humidifier – This component fits onto a CPAP machine, eliminating the need for a second hose and in some heated humidifiers, a second cord.
- Standalone humidifier – This component will work with any CPAP machine and doesn’t attach to the machine. It uses its own power cord and typically a short hose connected to the CPAP machine.
If you’re still feeling dried-out even after using a CPAP humidifier, check out the blog we posted earlier this month—it has all kinds of hints on how to cope in a CPAP desert! If you’re still using sleep apnea therapy without a humidifier, head over to our online store and pick out a humidifier today!