Humidifiers! More than you ever thought you'd want to know

We used to have three ultrasonics. After one winter, we're down to one. Suffice it to say, I hate them.

Ok...add whole house evaporative humidifier to my "stuff Technology Connections got me to buy" (along with powder detergent to add to my dishwasher prewash)

Sara, no h

Might I ask what antibacterial solution you folks use? Is it that Essick Air 1970 stuff, or something else? BTW: just got an evap humidifiers because of this and it blows the little ultrasonics we were using out of the water!

Buckaroo Bunny Slippers

Same here! I wish I could find them.

Nuki Chau

I recall that older humidifiers involved a motorized funnel that dipped into the bucket of water and spun around and that drew the water up and through the top of the unit. Mainly used for when we had bad colds. I'm assuming this was one of those impeller humidifiers.

Arthur Robillard

What if the wick floated somehow? Maybe the fan could float too?

Stephen Gillie

My boyfriend and actually did a lot of reading and research into humidifiers before we bought a replacement for our warm mist one when it gave up the ghost. I hope it's not unwelcome if I share some of that info. We ended up going with an evaporative humidifier, based on Wirecutter's recommendations (and some other looking around), but we needed one fast, and we just went with something we could find at the local Walmart. It's fine, but not great. When we moved into a bigger place, we bought the top recommendation (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifier/), and it's much quieter, nicer, easier to fill…just all around a better device. We just have the two, but they do a fine job for our ~1500 square foot house, keeping things between 40-50%. Using multiple smaller units does a better job at evenly humidifying than one large central one, though that might not be as big a deal with forced air as with our water baseboard. When we first get them out (or when it's especially cold), we often have to fill them up twice a day, but generally it's just once at night before we go to bed. I can see why folks would be nervous about stuff growing in there or on the wick, but we've never had any issues with anything like that on either of our units. We use a (fragrance free) bacteriostat product, probably quite similar to what you're using, and we replace our filters each year before we get them back out in the fall, so we're not doing anything special. My boyfriend also found a supplier who makes a wick that seems much more effective at evaporating the water and which only uses paper in its construction, so that's a tiny bit less plastic getting tossed out each year. (https://www.filters-now.com/)

Dane Peterson

"Quicklier" love it

Corey Ogburn

I use Boneco W200 and recommend it to everybody - it uses a foamy-plastic thingy instead of plastic discs which allows us to just wash it in the washing machine and everything else - in dishwasher. Basically it is the better solution to bringing the water higher up with little to no noise.

1. Observe that your lips are hella dry and you're constantly getting shocked by everything, twice 2. Realize that everything happens because air is dry 3. Watch Alec's new vid but you're too lazy to buy ceramic evaporators 4. https://imgur.com/a/8gmv3Ek 5. profit

The same "too humid in Summer, too dry in Winter"-problem here... I have a sheet in a bucket full of water in my bedroom, and shower with open door and closed windows. And yes, blue and too bright LEDs nerve me as well, totally agree!!! Sometimes I even open brand new devices and replace the LEDs (SMD soldering, yeah! :-P) with red or amber ones...

MrHammond

Your body uses sweat to maintain a constant temperature. 30% humidity "feels" drier because it is very efficient at evaporating moisture (sweat) away from your skin. 100% humidity interferes with the sweat evaporative process and thus makes you feel wet / swampy / clammy

AdamR

I chose an ultrasonic air humidifier with an integrated IX resin demineralizer. "Dusting" still goes, but less intense than with the previous humidifier. The practical resource of the resin when used 24/7 on tap water is about three months in my case. Just enough for one winter, then replace the resin.

Sudden urge to buy a humidifier. It's less than 40% in my office right (has been for over a month looking at the log). My suspicion is things end up with blue LEDs and segment displays for the same reason my previous employer ended up switching to widescreen panels for their radars: it's what was available in large quantity and easy to get hold of. That said...that segment display is almost certainly a standard configuration, so you can probably replace it with a green, amber, or red one if you really dislike it. I wouldn't blame you: blue really doesn't go with that wood grain finish.

Chris Crowther

Oh I meant to watch these ones! I use a humidifier for my skin.

!

I picked my humidifier for its large tank and fan and the fact that it has a green LED indicator rather than the blue scourge. I am glad your video validates my choices. Thanks. Lol.

Matthieu (ergosteur)

Yep. My gaslog fireplace has a distinct orange flame for the first few minutes while it burns off things like the magnesium and calcium in the dust. If you left the stove burner on long enough, it would return to normal. The minerals are ionically - no, Autocorrect, I didn't really mean to type "ironically," thanks - attracted to the metal of the gas outlets on the burner, putting them in direct contact with the flame when lit. Of course, there's a whole physics course behind why this is the case but, suffice it to say, it's a harmless effect. At most, you may develop deposits on the gas outlets a little faster than normal, but not noticibly.

TheWebMachine

Something very odd with ultrasonic humidifiers -- The winter after a new stove was installed at my parents' house, I pointed out that the flame looked very yellow, like the combustion wasn't tuned right. The appliance repair people asked if there was a humidifier in the house. We thought that was absurd, because there was no way that the humidity from a humidifier could possibly change the color of the flame, especially since the flame looked fine in the summer, when the humidity was higher. It turns out that it wasn't the humidity, but the minerals: Enough sodium from the tap water was finding its way into the air that we were seeing a yellow flame from sodium burning, not from poor combustion. Basically, we were burning the "white dust". Found a video showing the effect... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtE1fEr8wPg

Brown with simulated wood grain. LGR will love it!

CharlieVictor

The one we had in the 80s was brown and hideous. "Carved" plastic accents. But its design was pretty simple. A roughly 2' diameter wheel with 6" across of spongey material. The wheel rotated vertically in a tub of water. The top protruded from the surface and was exposed to a fan. I believe I've seen similar models that used a flat disk of wick. It did suffer from a dripping noise but it wasn't terribly loud and not a particular nusance in our living room. A quick Google search for "wheel humidifier" shows it was probably a Beamis, and that a company called Hale still makes on in this style.

alexp206

When I was a kid in the early 1980s we had a humidifier which to my recollection used a high speed spinning plastic "pole" to whip up the water into vapor. It looked vaguely like your spaceship/bubble one with the blue top but it was more square and beige colored.

Don Eitner

Also would be keen to put in a float valve...I suppose you could run it in your kitchen or up to 15' from a sink... https://www.amazon.com/Reverse-Osmosis-System-Connect-Fittings%EF%BC%88ball/dp/B076HDV3Z2/ref=zg_bs_4650344011_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=QASHCSVPK1HSQW8APRHR

Sierra Mistystep

Does the fan speed setting go 4->3->2->1? If so, why? When the microcontroller starts the fan, does it start at full speed and drop to the set speed? If not, why not?

Sierra Mistystep

If you show a 3D printer in the 1st Act of a story, you better have printed out a gun to use in the 3rd Act.

Stephen Gillie

Fun Fact, if you happen to be living in an old house with areas of poor insulation, a little humidifier in winter will find them! We had a closet with an exterior wall and I discovered the entire baseboard was soaked after using one of those little ultrasonic jobs in the dry adjacent room.

Buckaroo Bunny Slippers

I really wanna see this,

Aaron Carson

If you put potpourri into the water, does it become a fragrant humidifier? Kinda like a water-based Glade PlugIn? If you replace the wick in the whole-house humidifier with thin cut beef strips, you could make jerky in that thing. Replace (or front) with a HEPA filter and it's an air filter too. Does someone sell heaters with built-in humidifiers? Seems like a good bundled feature for future furnaces. I live in WA State and have never seen humidity below 70%. Often, the humidity is over 100%. Thanks for making a great video explaining technology common in your section of the planet.

Stephen Gillie

I'm gonna add some info to my pinned comment before this goes live to address this, but here's why it didn't come up here: The cooling effect becomes greatly diminished as relative humidity increases. It will seem like (and did briefly!) it's really cooling their air when you first turn these units on and the air is quite dry, but once RH is above, maybe, 30% the air leaving them honestly doesn't feel cool at all. It definitely is cooler - thermodynamically it must be - but the temperature drop if the exit air is, according to the thermometer in my hygrometer, at most 2 or 3°C. In the end, the cooling effect will be dictated by how much water is added to the air, and the other thing to consider of course if the energy efficiency of your home heating system compared to resistive heating. In most cases, it would be better for your heating system to (be it heat pump or efficient natural gas) to re-heat whatever is lost from the cooling effect than to electrically heat the water to the point of vaporization.

Technology Connections

Loved this. However, as you noted at the beginning, evaporative coolers are not really effective unless you have arid conditions. However, the dry winter air in cold climates are exactly those sort of arid conditions. I am surprised you did not mention the fact that these evaporative humidifiers have the unfortunate side-effect of cooling the air as they humidify it. You note how energy intensive warm vapor humidifiers are since they are boiling water, but at least they are not cooling the room as they do so. If you take into account the extra energy you need to heat the room after cooling it slightly with the evaporative humidifier I wonder if the energy costs of the two different systems might be more comparable that it originally appears.

Upon rewatching, I picked up on the clever, but maybe unintentional use of Chekhov's 3D printer.

Mark Hesse

Do you think a little bit of bleach would work as a water treatment solution?

Low Key Spaceship Earth shirt. Yes. ;-)

Patrick Bianchi

Trying to wrap my head around relative humidity. I thought it would have something to do with air "spreading out" as it heats up, but that seems like not the case. Just that water will evaporate/condense much more readily based on temperature. But if 100% humidity at freezing has the same moisture content as ~30% humidity at indoor temperatures, why would that "feel drier"? Also, what about "warm mist" humidifiers? And if you're heating your house anyway, is the heat generated from these types of humidifiers not really waste (understanding that electric heat isn't very efficient)? Thanks Alec!

This is what I’ve been told in the past. The builder of my home left a chart for how to set the humidistat based on the outside temperature. It’s pretty annoying, but I believe my humidistat supports a temperature probe (to automatically handle this for me), so I’m looking into installing one.

"It's brown, and therefore excellent." Never change Alec.

Kevin Tessner

With how dry the air gets there, I'm sure clothes drying racks would be a great way to offset tumble dryer running costs and reduce how often the humidifier needs filling. Here in Ireland, the weather often gets so damp that we need to run a dehumidifier intermittently during the winter to avoid mould growth.

Seán Byrne

"It's just another way dry air SUCKS!" Love it.

Kevin Tessner

I love it... I've been having my ultrasonic running next to my indoor pine trees since December 1st.

James Hamilton

Turns out Buy & Large sells the brown one. The color is called Copper Night Https://www.amazon.com/AIRCARE-H12600-Whole-House-Console-Style-Evaporative/dp/B0000D8EJV/

Yoshi of the Wire

For several years I have used a Boneco 2055 humidifier with slowly rotating plastic discs (like the Venta Airwashers) at work. It goes through a tank of water a day (1 gallon in 8 hours) on low setting (12W) during winter. Originally it used a woven "Ionic Silver Stick" to keep the water free from yuckiness, but they stopped selling those and I tried using it without - in one week it smelled to bad to use. I then tried to use copper in the swamp and that seems to work fine, although all the limescale is greenish now. By the way it is recommended to descale it infrequently as the limescale increases the surface area of the plastic discs and improves evaporation.

Søren Møller

Really? Wow...we go the opposite direction in the USA; maximum sealing from the outside air. We endeavor to create a completely sealed "envelope," as the tradesmen say, inside the house. We see too much of a temperature extreme in much of the country between seasons.

TheWebMachine

Are venta airwashers with the rotating cylinders just spinning swamp coolers? (And thank you for all the awesome content, really loving the channel!)

Holden Higgins

Your latest videos have earned a bump in my Patreon membership. Thank you for all you do!

Dre

For those of you that have some experience with whole home humidifiers I'm wondering if you adjust your settings based on the outdoor temperature. Everything I've read recommends a progressively lower indoor humidity as temperature drops. For example, at 40F a max of 40% RH. I assume the concern is that high indoor relative humidity will increase the chance of significant condensation forming in the exterior wall cavities.

Eric Blom

I just bought a replacement whole house humidifier for the one that was installed in the 70s and appears to have been abandoned. Likely due to the required annual maintenance you mentioned. But it had a automatic control option that tied into the exterior temperature. I would be curious why there is a curve of relative humidity comfort with exterior as opposed to an absolute comfortable humidity. As well, my wife and I have often had a humidifier even in the summer months especially with the air conditioner running, but the manufacturer suggests closing the damper in the spring.

You say the big humidifier doesn't have to run until the heating comes on and raises the temperature, but doesn't this suggest there is poor ventilation in the house? If there was constant ventilation then air from outside would be drawn in and the humidity gradually drop in the winter, regardless of the effect from the heating. I live in Finland and it's the law that new houses have constant ventilation. Even my house from the 70's has a roof fan sucking air out of the bathrooms (which is drawn in through small vents above the windows in other rooms) I tried using an ultrasonic humidifier to raise the humidity but it had pretty much no effect thanks to the constant ventilation in the house.

Richard Bevan

This is very true! Although one thing that I intended to discuss but slipped my mind until after it was shot was that the cooling effect from the evaporation seems quite minimal. I wanted to discuss it in terms of "see how dumb the tiny swamp cooler thing is?" but didn't get back to that comparison. The temperature of the air leaving the large humidifier is only a few degrees colder than ambient, and honestly not even noticeably. What complicates this more, of course, is that you could in theory turn the heat down and feel the same warmth with more moisture in the air, which then makes the efficiency discussion more important.

Technology Connections

One comment on efficiency - no matter what humidifier type, the energy to vaporize water has to come from somewhere. Thermodynamics really hates a free lunch... Evaporative humidifiers effectively offload that to the heating system - they steal some energy from the air, cooling it down and forcing the HVAC to re-heat it. However, "warm mist" humidifiers swing too far in the other direction - they're paying the energy cost both to vaporize water, and to further heat the air. At the end of the day, it probably doesn't matter too much if you're running a humidifier during winter. A water boiling humidifier is effectively just a combination humidifier and space heater. The real question at that point is the cost of central heating vs electric heating.

Maybe we'll do a 180 in June or July!

Technology Connections

A thing I don't understand about the large humidifier market is why they're all so... ugly. Like, one model made by this company is a tacky as all get-out pedestal thing. The brown model is literally among the most attractive options, unless you'd prefer the meant-to-allude-to-furniture style of "credenza" or whatever that model was.

Technology Connections

We've had a fairly mild winter in MN so far and haven't needed to use any humidifiers--yet. The tabletop models I've used in the past seem to get so clogged with scale that they're basically useless so maybe it's time to get a (ahem) big brown one. Also--Light Dims! Keep adding layers of them until you reach the dim sum you need!

Mark Hesse

Your last comment about feeling warmer has been significant to me. I find I can keep my home temperature at least 5 degs (F) cooler when keeping winter humidity >65%- and still feel warm! The health benefits are another positive- especially in these viral times. I've used all these types at one time or another. Good review!

Will Latinette

Years ago I had one with a pump, it worked better longer, I found after a while the buildup on the wicks of the usual ones would prevent the capillary action from working well. It also had the weird occasional failure mode in which the flow of water would "stick" to the wrong part of the plastic casting and would then run down the wrong way and leak out and make a huge mess.... I ended up putting it in a big tray to catch that when it happened... These days I do enough hand-laundry that dries on racks with fans aimed at it to replace the humidifier. I also had a boiler with a normal resistance element rather than an electrode boiler, it worked great but yeah waste of power. But back 20 years ago or whatever we didn't care as much, right?

Michaela Pereckas

I've used those as well and had the same problem.

Mark Hesse

Have you seen the impellor cool mist ones? I always liked those, but they leave a white dust like the ultrasonics.

Chris Brosz

I was in the same boat but ultrasonic leaves that fine dust everywhere. I just stick to the boiling type now and descale.

Chris Brosz

I used wick humidifiers for years, but once I moved to North Texas, where fungus is VERY opportunistic because it's very dry here, no combination of chemical mixture would allow a wick to last more than a week. I was spending HUNDREDS a season on wicks alone, plus the added allergy aggravating spores being thrown into the air all the time. This year, I switched to a very large ultrasonic;16L tank with dual ultrasonic pads and UV sterilizer. I bought and added some mineral neutralizing pods and use brita filtered water and don't get any mineral dust on anything...no expensive distilled water required. It was the best $170 I spent on a humidifier! It's a top fill design, so it's super easy to keep running. It's a Lacidoll brand (who?? lol) but it hasn't let me down!

TheWebMachine

So you've done humidifiers! What about dehumidifiers? These are also very interesting, and apparently there are four different types: Heat Pump, Dehumidifying Ventilator, Chemical Absorbant (Desiccant) and Homemade.

Gadgetman

Don't worry too much about the captions! Most of us will still enjoy the video without them. And most of those that can't will understand. Stay rested and have a great night!