Which is the best room size humidifier to buy. One that produces a cool mist or one that produces a warm mist?
The only humidifier I’ve used was connected to the heater. It sprayed water into the air intake so it would have been a warm mist when it exited the heater.
Depends. I prefer warm mist because it makes the room warmer. I also feel (yeah, that’s scientific) that warm mist is absorbed by the air better than cool. It’s all personal preference.
Tried a cool mist humidifier once. (in 1960. For twenty minutes.) They work by using an ultrasonic emitter to atomize and aerosolize water droplets which are basically room-temperature. Those droplets then exit the humidifier and evaporate, taking their heat of vaporization directly from the air and cooling that air in the process. The problem is that dissolved solids in the water also become airborne with those droplets; when each droplet evaporates completely, it leaves behind a speck of airborne dust. That dust eventually settles out on the various surfaces in your room. Cool-mist humidifiers typically include some sort of “filter” with them, but I’m not sure this is intended for (or is capable of) removing dissolved solids from the water. The only way around that, as far as I can tell, is to use only distilled water, which will have minimal dissolved solids. If you use tap water, be prepared to dust your room more often.
We have a warm mist humidifier, which uses a hot element to boil water and produce steam (if you see any mist leaving one of these, it’s typically recondensed steam, which will have negligible dissolved-solid content). You don’t get any dust out of these because the dissolved solids stay behind. In fact, they end up crusted on the hot element, and after a while the buildup can cause noisy boiling action, necessitating a good cleaning using vinegar or some other calc remover (e.g. coffee-maker cleaner).
A warm-mist humidifer will add some heat to the room (they draw a significant amount of electrical power); this will make the room warmer, or reduce the amount of heat input from your residence’s main heating system, depending on how good the air circulation is. A cool-mist humidifier will tend to cool a room, since the heat for vaporizing the water droplets comes from the air itself (via evaporative cooling). Neither one has any trouble getting its ejecta to vaporize completely.
Mahine elf
Thanks for the info. My thoughts on the subject are pretty much th same as yours but was not sure if I was right. You removed all doubts. Thanks
There are also cool mist humidifiers that use filters instead of ultrasonics. These also cool the room a bit, but shouldn’t deposit any solids, as the water is evaporated by air going through the filter instead of being atomized. Downside is that you need to clean or replace the filters regularly.
Cooling the room shouldn’t be a major issue if you have a robust heating system, which is likely to be more cost efficient than a little water boiling device.