Time to try a new idea

The original water delivery for this Lennox HCWP2-18 whole house humidifier that was installed with our Water Furnace geothermal system seemed to be a pretty poor design. The salesman told us it was a good idea that we use hot water plumbed into the humidifier, as Geo systems don't generate as much heat as your gas fired furnace. Sounds good, right? Well, in practice I could see way too much water being delivered to the Water Panel, which yielded a bunch of hot water going out the overflow (which was simply put through a hole into the sand under our basement floor, not to an actual drain!). I've tried regulating the flow upstream by simply not opening the valve substantially, but due to the hot water, the valve behaves differently as it runs.

So, I finally did a bunch of research and put together a couple items that restrict the flow at the output, creating a more of a uniform mist and allows the solenoid to work properly (at full pressure). I found the parts at Ecologic Technologies, Inc, and assembled them today. The 0.012" orifice I selected delivers in the neighborhood of 0.46 of a Gallon Per Hour to the humidifier, much better than the gallons per hour I used to see go through there.

It took about 7 minutes before any water was seen in the overflow pipe, and that was more like a dampness, not a flow. It used to be less than a minute when I had the valve partially closed, which would then sometimes not even have enough pressure to open the solenoid, so worked sporadically.