I bought this Honeywell humidifier some months ago and it really is not getting the job done. Given how simple its operation is it is weirdly expensive too. I wouldn’t mind if it got the job done but I can barely tell if it is actually making an impact on the air in my place. I bought an air quality monitor which, among other things, tracks air humidity and I can see it maybe increases humidity but only a few percent. And I get the unit is only meant for a room. I used the air quality monitor in the bedroom where it is and it increased humidity by only a few percent.
Yes, the humidifier is working. Yes, I replace the filter-thing. I can see it consume water as I have to refill the tank every 12(ish) hours). Even still the humidity in my place hovers around 30-35% which is a bit low (aiming for 40% at a minimum).
So, any recommendations on a humidifier that gets the job done?
Just a word of advice; make sure you put the humidifier at least a few feet off the floor. I ran it for weeks just inches above the wooden floor and now the floor has become too dampened. The humidity can vary drastically even just by a distance of 1 meter; it can be 74% humid in one area but just 56% humid a few feet away.
An interesting feature of those ultrasonic humidifiers: if you use tap water in them, they will make gas-burner stove flames burn with orange flame tips. This is from the minerals in the water being blasted into the air.
If you start Googling why your flame tips are orange, you’ll find yourself reading all kinds of scary stuff that makes you fear you will die in your sleep.
That bad stuff is a possibility, but an experiment is in order: shut off the humidifier and check the flames a few hours later.
For me, an “interesting” part of ultrasonic humidifiers is they would leave a thin film of white dust on everything. I assume it was minerals in the water. Not dangerous but also I will never have another one again.
Yeah, we had humidifiers when our kids were little, and after trying multiple kinds, we ended up with the old school, flying-saucer looking Vicks steam vaporizer. Takes tap water, is cheap and simple, and doesn’t leave weird crud/dust everywhere. Also doesn’t require too much in the way of maintenance either.
We had the same problem, unless we used distilled water. I’m certain it was the minerals in the water- we’ve got medium-hard water here.
I’m surprised. It is very common. Not harmful but annoying to have to clean up. And I live in Chicago so not well water (honestly some of the best water in the country…New York City’s is great too). Still there are some minerals in it.
Certain types of humidifiers which distribute mist in the air to raise indoor humidity levels during dry conditions can contain high concentrations of minerals, typically from a hard water supply. When the mist travels throughout your home and settles on tables, furniture, and other surfaces, it dries out and leaves behind mineral deposits that are referred to as white dust because of its white color.
After much research we got a Honeywell Cool Moisture humidifier. It worked fine, but practically speaking it couldn’t adequately serve a larger space than a master bedroom.
A year ago we bit the bullet and got a “whole house” humidifier installed on our downstairs system. Thankfully, its output bleeds up into the bedroom floor, so we easily maintain 35+% humidity.
In a house with central heating the air in a room is swapped 8-10 times per hour, which makes it hard for a humidifier to keep up. You can get the humidity level higher by doing things like shutting doors and vents so the air cycles less often.
An ultrasonic humidifier can get more water into the air quicker, but you want to use distilled water or everything is going to be covered in mineral dust, and getting a gallon+ of distilled water in a day is a hassle (though you can get a home distiller)
Steam humidifiers can be a good option in the winter but you’ll have to do something to dump that heat in the summer, probably overworking your air conditioner.
The humidifier linked in the OP isn’t ultrasonic - the wicking filter is just a webbing of absorbent material, with the bottom of it sitting it water so it stays saturated. Then there’s a fan that blows air through the filter to humidify the air. I have 2 of them, they’re pretty dirt simple, I assume the one in the OP is expensive because it has the ultraviolet sanitizer light.
Here’s an example of the filters - they sit upright in a shallow pool of water, then there’s a fan above them that pulls air vertically through them.
ETA: No white powder, no visible mist, I do get some condensation on cold windows.
Other than using an “F” to show the tank is empty I have no complaints about it. The auto mode can keep the whole house at 40-45% humidity when it would have been 10-20% without it. The tank is large enough that I fill it every 1-2 days.
The fan makes noise, but that’s how these things work. It doesn’t run continuously, so it’s only intermittently annoying. It is possible to force it to only run at the lowest fan speed, but I just let it run in auto, where it will run the fan faster the farther away it is from the set point.
The white film from the ultrasonic ones is also in the air, and made my PM2.5 and PM10 air quality meter go crazy. This one captures all that in the filter, which I’m sure will be disgusting whenever it is time to change it.
I don’t have a humidifier recommendation. But I may have some relevant experience with my dehumidifier.
This is huge. Even in a 2-bedroom high rise apartment like mine. IIRC our OP lives in a similarly-sized high rise condo. The good news about residences like this is they’re a lot more airtight than a single-family house.
IMO / IME you can’t (de-)humidify a room; you have to (de-)humidify the entire house / apartment. So air circulation is your friend, not your enemy. I run my dehumidifer 24/7/365. It has a target humidity value where it’ll take a break, but only rarely reaches it during the more humid times of the year.
I have my HVAC system set to where the fan also runs 24/7/365. This homogenizes the humidity; otherwise there’s a cloud of excessively dry (OP read “wet”) air near your machine and the rest of the air in your apartment is less good than that. And if your machine has a humidity-stat, it will be misled by the cloud of improved air where it is, and cut off while the rest of your rooms are still not good.
When I was setting up my dehumidifier, I bought 6 of these things:
I now have one in each room and walk-in closet. That’s how I learned how well single-room (de-)humidification doesn’t work. For rather little investment you can find out what’s really going on in your residence. FYI, I also bought some that were much cheaper & came in a 6-pack; they were useless. 6 of them sitting on a counter side by side and left to settle for a couple hours had a 20% spread in humidity readings and a 15F spread in sensed temperature. The Chinese can make goods too shoddy to use. The ones I cited above are reliable and repeatable.
Back when I lived where adding humidity in winters was necessary, our whole-house HVAC systems had build in humidifiers that used the running water over a metal mesh system. It was essentially a swamp cooler built into the furnace exit ducting. Those meshes became encrusted with gunk and needed to be thrown out every season. Those systems also had a “humidistat” with a sensor placed some feet away where it wasn’t sensing the output air going into the HVAC ducting, but rather nearby room = return air.
Even then we found that for a comfortable humidity level around the house we had to run the HVAC fans 24/7/365. Which distinctly increased the cost of winter heat. Not for the cost of the fan operation itself, but for how much more effectively it stirred the air everywhere and promoted more rapid cooling. That cold pool in the outside corner of that mostly unused room wasn’t just left there to be chilly; it was actively being blended into the rest of the house air. And hence needed to be re-heated on each round trip.
Every humidifier, no matter what the mechanism, is going to humidify the exact same quantity of air for the exact same water consumed. If more than 2 tanks a day is required to humidify your room, more than 2 tanks is always going to be required to humidify your room. Start by looking at ways you can change the room design. Is the room not well sealed to the outside? Is it part of a central air system with a constantly blowing fan? Are there large cracks around the doors you can buy some rubber skirts to seal better?
If there’s no way to change room design, then you’re going to have to find a way to parallelize. 2 of the same humidifier, consuming the same rate of water is going to humidify exactly twice as effectively. Keep adding until you can reach a steady state.
Also, I’ll continue to be a broken record and recommend Technology Connections whenever possible. This is the first in a series of videos he’s made on the topic of humidification:
Of the three styles of humidifiers on the market, he recommends the console evaporative type and gives tips about how to make them less of a pain in the ass to use and maintain.
that’s how these things work. It doesn’t run continuously, so it’s only intermittently annoying. It is possible to force it to only run at the lowest fan speed, but I just let it run in auto, where it will run the fan faster the farther away it is from the set point.