Humidifiers: Simpler is better?

This video certainly won't be very... dry. I've had a bit of an epiphany the last few days. Look, over the summer I made a video about this stupid thing. You can check it out if you want (links are everywhere), but as a quick summary, this is what claims to be a "personal air conditioner" but is actually a tiny evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler. . And that's why they're, well, stupid! Unless you live in a really arid place, adding moisture to the air is exactly the wrong way to achieve cooling. These things are generally a waste of mental space, desk pace, and plastic.

Just…don't do it. Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Winter is rearing its ugly head here in the Midwest, which means the air is getting uncomfortably dry. I ventured to the exotic lands of Walmart to buy a cheap humidifier for my bedroom. In fact, this one! It now claims to emit an “invisible cold mist,” which, okay. Sure. I went to set it up and lo and behold, the thing is just a swamp cooler. This is, almost amazingly, the exact same device as the personal refrigerator, except for a much larger water tank and fan. Hey. Yes, this is almost stupidly simple and I love it.

There are three basic parts: the water tank, the body containing the fan, and the water absorbing matrix. A plastic base provides support for the three parts to join together. The matrix, which Equate calls a filter but that's... a silly name, sits in a shallow puddle of water and capillary action causes the water to rise up through the material and soak it completely. This absorbing action is why most sensible humidifier manufacturers call it... John. Sorry, the wick. During operation, the fan draws air in through the wet wick. The large surface area of ​​the wick helps the water in it evaporate into the air more quickly, and the fan makes this even faster by constantly moving air through it.

As the water evaporates, the wick continues to absorb more water. The water tank allows for continuous operation by constantly replenishing the pool's water and keeping it at a constant height, at least until it is depleted. Its shape contains a hole for the wick, and the tank's carrying handle becomes the air inlet. Very smart! That being said, this is not a very good humidifier. It's just not capable of producing much: it takes about two days running on its high setting to run through the entire tank, as opposed to its "up to 24 hours" run time. That makes it suitable for small rooms, but not much else.

To be fair, they said that on the box. Now I wanted to get something bigger, something capable of humidifying my entire house. And it turns out that most whole-house

humidifiers

use the same concept as this one, but expanded. Through them, I apparently discovered one of those cases where the simplest idea is the most effective. Let's back up a minute. Why do I want a humidifier in the first place? Many of you around the world probably think that wanting to add humidity to the air is crazy. You probably live somewhere where it's hot and humid. Made of fun!

It's hot and humid here too! In summer… yes, we have the worst of both worlds. It's great! In winter, however, nature conspires against us and makes the air often unbearably dry. You see, when we talk about humidity we almost always talk in terms of relative humidity. It is expressed as a percentage, which indicates how much moisture is in the air compared to the air's ability to hold moisture. When the relative humidity is 50%, the air retains half of the water it can. It is 50% humid. When it is at 100%, the air is completely saturated and can no longer absorb moisture.

We use relative humidity because it correlates with the way our bodies and, in fact, almost everything "feels" humidity. But, and this is where nature surprises you, the air's ability to retain moisture varies with its temperature. Hot air can contain more moisture than cold air: at 20 degrees Celsius or 68 Fahrenheit, 1 kilogram of air can contain about 15 grams of water vapor. At zero degrees Celsius, or 32 Fahrenheit, it can only hold about 5 grams, about a third. That means that at the same relative humidity, say 50%, the outside air can only hold one-third of the moisture that the air in your home can hold.

Now, because the air in your home is ultimately the same air as the outside, you are at the mercy of how humid the outside air is. And when you heat that air to make a living space more comfortable, you increase its ability to retain moisture, but not the actual amount of moisture it contains. This causes the relative humidity to plummet. At freezing point, even if the outside air is 100% humidity, when you heat it to a comfortable indoor air temperature now the relative humidity is only 33%. It didn't lose moisture, it was just able to retain more and that makes it feel drier.

This gets worse the colder it is outside. Since where I live it is not uncommon for the outside temperature to be between zero and 10 degrees Fahrenheit (that is, -18 to -12 degrees Celsius), the indoor air can sometimes be desert-like levels of dryness. This is obviously uncomfortable, causes peeling skin and chapped lips, often causes an itchy throat, causes static discharges all the time, and appears to be a contributing factor to viral spread, although we don't really understand why. still. One hypothesis is that drier air allows airborne droplets containing virus particles to remain suspended longer, as those droplets dry quickly and stay afloat more easily with less mass, but that is just one explanation and In any case it is not important for this video.

It's just another way dry air stinks! Anyway, the only way we can get the relative humidity back up after warming the outside air is by adding humidity to the air ourselves. And that's what

humidifiers

are for. You add water to them and they make it evaporate into the air to increase the relative humidity. And of course, there are several types of humidifiers. Shall we talk about them? Let's talk about them! Includes one you can make yourself. This is the old warm mist Vicks style thing. It's made up of two parts: an oddly shaped plastic jug that holds water and is nearly impossible to clean effectively, and, uh... this little tidbit that sits in the water.

The only thing this does is slowly boil water. Oh really. That's... that's all he does. And they're also very picky: if the water doesn't have enough minerals, it won't work and they have to put a label here that says, "Hey, if this doesn't start working in 10 minutes, try adding a little salt and see if that helps." ". If it's not clear, I don't really like them, but after all, they're not exactly marketed as humidifiers. They are more of a personal care product intended to be used in conjunction with the latest cold fighting products from Vicks or whatever.

But the main reason I don't like them is simply that boiling water is an energy-intensive method of vaporization. This uses about 50 watts continuously, which, yeah, that's not a lot. It turns out it's much worse than this! I had some suspicions that it only consumed 50 watts, so when I recorded the B-roll material for this video I decided to descale it with vinegar. This is all the lovely crap that came out of this. Delicious! After this descaling, it now produces more steam and consumes 200 watts! That's a lot. And apparently I've discovered something of a mystery. Its power consumption is just… strange.

It seems to rise slowly when you plug it in, and if you take it out of the water it instantly drops to practically zero. I'm starting to wonder if this is really an electrode boiler. That would help explain the need for salt in some circumstances. I've been trying to find a concrete answer online but without much success. So, I'll take this apart in a quick and dirty video on my second channel. A link will be below. However, I just want to say that I have sold it a bit on its ability to humidify. Assuming it's working properly, it will consume a gallon in 12 hours, which is a pretty substantial output.

It will simply use up a lot of energy in the process, and I stand by my claim that they are finicky and annoying. Another common style of humidifier is this one! The variety of ultrasonic cold mist. This is, in my opinion, without a doubt the most interesting style of humidifier. A piezoelectric disk sits at the bottom of a puddle of water. A very high frequency signal, in the megahertz range, is sent to this disk, causing it to vibrate at that frequency. This causes micron-sized water droplets to form on the surface of the water, and a small fan draws in air from beneath the device and pushes it out through this tube.

When the tank sits on the base, airflow carries these small water droplets through this hole in the tank, and a small spout hat helps direct the water-air mixture up and out. What comes out of here are microscopic drops of water suspended in the air; that's why they are visible. In a sense, this thing generates clouds! But they disappear quickly. The tiny size of the droplets means that they will evaporate almost instantly and therefore the relative humidity of the air in the room will increase. These humidifiers are quite effective – this particular unit will use up your water tank in about 24 hours.

They also don't require as much energy. At its maximum power, this unit consumes around 32 watts, although it is adjustable. But these are not perfect. There is always a catch. If you have hard water, the mineral content of the water ends up in the air. Because water is released into the air as liquid water and evaporates after leaving the device, a white powder may form on objects, especially near the humidifier. This is the same limescale you deal with in sinks and showers, but now it's everywhere. It's very nice. Now, that particular problem can be solved by filling the tank with store-bought distilled water, but that is annoying and also becomes a major expense if you need to fill it daily and/or have multiple units.

There's also the fun fact that any mold, bacteria, chemical impurities or other good that may be in the water tank... will also end up in the air. I'm... I'm aiming straight for that. Now, to be clear, this is not a huge concern and is certainly not unique to ultrasonic humidifiers. And then of course the last common style that you can buy in stores is this one. "Invisible cold fog" is a marketing term for evaporation. Evaporative humidifiers simply help water evaporate by giving it a large surface area to adhere to and airflow so it can hitch a ride.

They are extremely simple, but also extremely effective. You're right: I said this one wasn't very effective, but here's why: This is your fuse, right? And... This is the wick for a whole house humidifier. See the difference? Here is the humidifier this giant wick belongs to. It is brown and therefore excellent. This style of humidifier is sometimes called a console humidifier and is conceptually identical to the small one from Walmart, but expanded and improved in several ways. That said, I'm not entirely enthusiastic about it and will discuss my many objections as we go. However, it is undeniable that he is excellent at his job.

The device itself is little more than a large plastic box with wheels (with imitation wood excellence) and a fan. The fan sits at the top of the case, and when it's running, it draws air in through this vent at the back and exhausts it out the top. The wick is directly in front of that vent and you will notice that the vent does not go all the way to the bottom. This is because, of course, the wick has to sit in a puddle of water, and a vent that goes all the way to the bottom would ruin that perspective a bit.

You can see that the water level is not much lower than the bottom of the vent, which makes moving this thing wonderfully stressful. And with that, here comes my first quibble: the box claims it has a 5.4 gallon capacity, which is ridiculously misleading. Look, this is your water tank. It's 2.5 gallons. About three gallons sit at the bottom of the humidifier, but that level is kept constant by the bottle. When the bottle runs out, it will continue to run for a while and use up some of the water at the bottom, but that makes filling it a two-step process: fill the bottom of the humidifier and then the bottle.

You could simply fill the bottle, but then you will have to do it again immediately after at least some of its contents have been emptied to refill the bottom to the correct level. Even worse is that a float switch prevents it from working when the water gets about an inch below full level, meaning you could never get it to produce 5.4 gallons of water in one go. Therefore, in my opinion,All purposes has a 2.5 gallon capacity. And aside from this particular number nonsense, the bottle itself isn't the best. I routinely have to replace this lid or it will leak, a mishap that would cause the bottom to become overfilled and water to spill out the back!

This is certainly not without problems. What do you think about promoting a product? Anyway, this is where things get a little interesting. The fan is not just any fan. It is a fan controlled by a hygrostat. A pair of dials, one of which can also be pressed as a button, serve as the basic user interface, it's blue. Blue! What, what, why does it have to be blue? And so bright? Manufacturers of seemingly literally everything now cut. he. outside. Nobody needs this. It should be readable, not flashy. Wow. What if this was in my bedroom? Don't you think I should be able to sleep?

You didn't even put it in the box, not that you thought you'd make another sale being fashionable and thus wearing the blue ell eee deez. Bring back boring, boring red, amber, and maybe green screens, please. I'm so over this. Where was it? Okay then, atrocious display aside, which I'll go ahead and fix right now by applying a LightDim decal on top. I really can't believe this product should exist, yes, I'll go further on this tangent... you can select between four fan speeds and set the desired relative humidity in five percent increments. Built into the power cord is a hygrometer that you'll use to measure relative humidity, and the built-in microcontroller will turn the fan on and off accordingly.

The fan will turn on when the humidity is three percent below the set point and turn off when it reaches one percent above. One thing that has really surprised me is how accurate basic hygrometers apparently are today. The humidifier's display reads just a couple of percentage points from both this analog dial and what my smart thermostat is telling me. Honestly, it's a little surprising, but still the benefit of having a humidistat is tremendous. Being able to self-regulate means it can respond appropriately to different conditions and maintain constant humidity levels. And it has been very interesting to observe.

I have it placed in a central location near my thermostat, and when the heat is off, neither is the humidifier. But, within minutes of the heat starting, the relative humidity drops to the point where it needs to work. This makes a lot of sense because the now warmer air can absorb more moisture, so its relative humidity has decreased slightly. The humidifier will continue to operate for about five minutes after the heat has been turned off. And then it will have satisfied the humidity set point and will go dormant. What's really fascinating is that it has a remarkably consistent reading as the temperature gradually drops.

I have it set at 50 percent, and after stopping it at 51, it can drop back to 50 or even 49 percent... but no more. It takes until the heat comes back on for the humidity to drop below that point, and this seems to be the case throughout the house, according to my little hygrometer friend. I'm actually very curious about this because it appears that moisture leaves the air at a rate correlated with the drop in temperature. I run my thermostat on a schedule to drop the temperature by 4 degrees at night, and even then the humidifier won't run until the heat comes back on, and that can be hours later.

Humidity remains close to 50% the entire time the temperature drops. It's fascinating, although at the moment it's not too cold yet, so maybe this behavior won't last. Anyway, while this thing is ugly and bothers me in a number of ways, it's undeniably great for humidifying, especially from an energy standpoint. Its fan is quite large, so it uses the most power of any humidifier we've seen so far while it's running (around 65 watts at low fan speed), but it only needs to run for about 6 hours on a typical day. , and that's at its lowest fan speed. With my current usage, it consumes the entire 2.5 gallon bottle per day.

Do the math and you'll find that it uses 144 watt-hours per gallon. A strange metric for sure, but hey! Works. The ultrasonic mister takes the same amount of time to consume 1 gallon at 32 watts continuously, meaning he uses 768 watt-hours per gallon. That's more than 5 times the energy per humidification unit! Oh, and the standby power consumption of this great unit is excellent: only about a third of a watt. Despite that strident display. My old dishwasher used triple that! Honestly, it's surprising how much water this thing adds to the air when it works. Just feeling the air coming out of it is impressive, it's downright swampy.

Leaving the hygrometer on top reveals that the air it supplies has at least 70% humidity. To give you an idea of ​​how quickly it goes through the water, you can hear the bottle go "glug glug glug" as it replenishes the water level and this happens more frequently than every five minutes when it is running. Surprisingly, this is great for making liquid water evaporate with nothing but air flow. Frankly, setting this up has been a bit surprising for me. It is very simple, but extraordinarily effective. Using less energy during a day than this small ultrasonic humidifier, it can take care of my entire house and not just one room.

I've been checking with my hygrometer and, in fact, the humidity is fairly constant from room to room, varying only about five percent. Of course, this is a ridiculous overkill for the size of my house and I have the benefit of a forced air furnace to help move the air. But it really seems like evaporative humidifiers are, at least in many ways, the best. Of course, there is a problem. And it's, uh... something big. Evaporative humidifiers can get…gross. To be clear, all humidifiers get icky over time, but the evaporative style tends to present the most opportunities for ickiness because there's a giant wet sponge sitting in a puddle of water with a fan blowing air into it and , hence everyone's favorite mold spores. and the bacteria are taken directly to a beautiful place to live.

It's great. There are now ways to combat this problem. First, wicks almost always need to be replaced seasonally and there are water treatment products available to inhibit bacterial growth. I've been using this for a while with regular water treatments and so far no musty smell has developed, which is the most common complaint about this style of humidifier. The particular treatment I'm using is supposed to help with mineral buildup as well, but we'll see. But this is where I have good news. This is conceptually a very simple device. And that means you can make one yourself! All you need is something that will absorb the water and give it a large surface area.

And you have a lot of those: towels! Take a large bowl, fill it perhaps one-third full with water, and submerge the center of a small towel in it. Maybe you need to load it with something. Plush fabric is great for this; After all, that's why towels help you dry things: They have lots of small fibers that water clings to. Those same fibers provide places from which water evaporates. Try experimenting with different bowls, towels, amounts of water, etc. To measure the effectiveness of your invention, grab one of these little hygrometers. They're not the most accurate out there, but they're very good at guiding you and they only cost about $5.

You can speed up evaporation with a table fan aimed at the towels. And, best of all, you can simply wipe this makeshift wicking material through your clothing and change it as often as you like. Now this isn't that effective, I won't lie, but a quick test in my roughly 100 square foot office showed that I could maintain 50% humidity with the help of a fan. And that was, frankly, with horrible towel placement. What I would love to see come to market is some sort of rack intended to hold towels, perhaps a tea towel or pieces of towels in a vertical zig-zag arrangement, a sort of replica of this wick cartridge, but with a washable towel instead of this paper. honeycomb things It probably wouldn't work as well as these paper wicks, but it would be fun to try.

Simply place it in a shallow dish and sit it in front of a fan. This might even push me to buy a decent 3D printer… But, good news for those of us who just can't be bothered, the same manufacturer of this great console makes what they call a “mini” console and it's delightfully simple. It is little more than a bucket, a fan and two wicks. The wicks are placed in these slots, a cover sits between them, and a fan controlled by the exact same humidistat (and unfortunately the same blue LEDs...) forces air through the wicks when necessary.

It takes air from the sides and expels it from the top, well moistened. This isn't as effective as the big brown beast here simply because it's smaller, but it is much, much easier to use. And quieter too, at least at low fan speeds. Filling it is as easy as filling a bucket because… that's what it is. Simply remove the fan and take it to the sink. Much less complicated than dealing with a tank or jug ​​and much easier to clean. Although in this case there is a strange peculiarity: the more you fill it, the less effective it will be because less of the wick will be exposed to the air.

It's probably best to keep the water level at about half the height of the wick or less. Here's a pro tip if you decide to buy a humidifier like these. If you use a water treatment product, which I highly recommend, put it in a soap pump! Calculate how many pumps it takes to fill, say, a tablespoon and use that to determine how many pumps you will need each time you fill your humidifier. It's much less complicated and also more consistent. I decided to buy this amber glass pump in case the chemicals in the solution are sensitive to light (which, eh, the jar it comes in probably doesn't), but you can use an old, well-cleaned pump. soap pump.

In this case I know I need to add 15 squirts every time I fill this bottle. Also, for some reason, large humidifiers like these seem to only be available in hardware stores, at least in my part of the US. Your big box general store like Walmart seems to only sell small, single-room units, although interestingly, the last one time I was at Walmart they sold not only these exact hygrometers, but also the same water treatment chemical I am using in these. So yes. I don't know exactly why, but I also recommend purchasing some replacement wicks for years to come.

Any large hardware store should carry them, and for my fellow Midwesters, Menards has plenty. That's all I have to say here. Although these evaporative humidifiers are not the flashiest or most technically intriguing, they seem to do their job extremely effectively and efficiently. However, I would like to suggest some revisions to this particular design. What I would love to see is a wick that stands much higher, allowing the tank to hold much more water, perhaps 10 or more gallons. Instead of requiring it to sit in a puddle of water, I think it would be nice if a pump was used to bring water to the wick.

This is actually a fairly common design of large swamp coolers. This design would allow it to run for days without stopping. I imagine one difficulty with this, aside from the simple fact that the pump becomes something that can fail, is that this would make it much noisier. It would be necessary to devise a method to trap the water so that it does not fall from a great height; Otherwise, you would hear a constant drip when the thing runs. Plus, of course, this would add tubes and therefore more places for mold and bacteria to find shelter. Maybe not the best idea, but I will tell the folks at AirCare that I really don't like the float switch on this unit.

Look, instead of just using it to let you know it's empty, turn the unit off. I would prefer the fan to keep running when it ran out of water so the wick could dry out. Turning off the unit means that standing water will be stuck to both the wick and the bottom, which I find a little unsettling. Also, its implementation is very dumb. It's a stick with a Styrofoam float that is held steady by a ring on the wick cartridge and then tapped on the bottom of the fan. I'd probably just turn that switch off, maybe force the stick up all the time by putting a rock under it or something.

The simple bucket, for what it's worth, has no float switch, so it will simply run untilto your heart's content no matter what the water level is. I much prefer that. Now before I go, I want to clarify that these types of portable units are by no means your only option. Whole house humidifiers that are installed into your home's HVAC system are also quite common and, although you may not know it, they are also evaporative! These units will divert some of the air flowing through the ducts through themselves and are connected to a water supply. There is often an absorbent pad or wheel that also requires periodic replacement, although sometimes non-porous materials are used that only require cleaning.

However, if you've been using one of these and never opened it... you might want to look into it. Since I didn't have one of these in my HVAC system yet, I opted for a freestanding unit. And, despite its many small annoyances, overall I'm very happy with it. It has certainly made winter much more bearable. My lips were starting to crack a lot around Christmas time, but now that I have this running feeling, that's gone. Usually, it would be time to apply lipstick. And honestly, I feel warmer now with the thermostat set to the same temperature. I don't know why this surprises me, since after all humid air always feels more oppressive in summer, and drier air feels cooler, but it did surprise me.

The air is much more comfortable in many ways. If you want to see how a humidifier can help you, why not try making your own first? At least it will give you something fun to do. Anyway, toodles! ♫ dank smooth jazz ♫ This is what it's intended to be... yes, no, it's facing the right direction. I shouldn't have doubted it. ...plastic base supports... shoot. That was going great! ...it sits in a shallow puddle of water and acts capillary... the mist is fluid, ah heuhhh, which makes it appropriate for small rooms, but not much else. Not much more. Why did I say so much?

That's stupid. Yes, that's not much, but it's not much either. That cat is having fun upstairs. But it won't be... it won't be much! Why does it have to be blue? And so bright? Heh, no, that's very exaggerated. Secret messages at the end of the videos in the subtitles? I have no idea what you're talking about. You must be thinking of some other channel that does that regularly.