What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

As a German I and many others are religiously following what our consumer reports "Stiftung Warentest" recommends (except for high-tech products). Germans have very high confidence in the products and many companies print a good test result ("very good" or even "good" on their packaging). Reasons are that they are extremely thorough, unbiased, financially independent and can be quite tough. They have sophisticated testing facilities, do lab tests, test lifetime of products with machines, etc. And they have been sued several times by companies. So when I cam to the US I was very worried of the basically unregulated companies to screw me over so naturally I (digitally) subscribed to the OG Consumer Reports (which historically seems to be the role model of all other international consumer reports). However I am so disappointed about the magazine:

- it is not very thorough or strict (rather leniant)

- it has a really poor selection of product categories

- besides a table of comparing the products features it has very little editorial buying guides that go more into detail.

In the case of the German magazine, when you read through some of the guides they can be quite entertaining, they slap the wrists of even the most powerful (german) companies if something breaks or if they falsely advertise features, or if there are critical design flaws in the product. I really wish CR would be as critical.

Erik posts a comment on Hacker News, next thing you know, there's a military coup in Myanmar. Factually correct.

The phrasing implies a causal relationship, which is what Wirecutter disputes.

Officially Wirecutter functions based on affiliate links and kickbacks and the reviewing staff isn't informed of this to maintain a separation. But this is a very weak defense. It's still a massive coincidence and obvious candidate for a conflict of interest when a product gets downgraded just as the kickback deal falls through.

Looking at the email exchanges I can't honestly think this is a coincidence. I've been shaken down before (unrelated to this topic) and that's exactly how it looked. My own experience going through Wirecutter's reviews kind of supports the idea that it's "pay to win".

If anyone here is after a good humidifier, the Air Innovations 1.4 gal one is quite good:

Model# HUMID16-WHT

Home Depot used to or still does sell them. They have a ceramic filter, anti microbial body, programmable for time or humidity level, and can produce mist. It’s actually quiet as well.

Well, I thought about building my own, but it's not so easy as you make it seem to get one that is efficient (i.e., not just brute force capacity through size) and easy to use.

- How to make it not look like an animal food barrel in your living room, aka WAF, although I do find that term somewhat demeaning as I get older - I used to not care about such things either when I was in my 20's, but nowadays I do, even if it's just because of the realization that people around me care.

- How to make a mechnism to easily fill it, without spilling. This is related to size - you can have a huge one so that you only have to fill it every few days, but then you'll need to shlepp around buckets or watering cans. If it's smaller, you need a separate tank, which you now have to hook up to the rest.

- How to moisten the wick. It's called a 'wick' because it, well, wicks, of course, but you need a relatively large surface contact area to get lots of water into the wick(s); or you need a pump that will keep vertical 'wicks' wet all the time.

- The fans need to be on the top, and large for minimum noise, but the largest Noctuas are only 20cm. But you need air intake from the bottom, somehow, while still maximizing volume efficiency (i.e., you don't want 75% of the volume of the device to be unused because you can only have water in the lower 25% because of the airflow design).

- You need something that can be cleaned and filled without too much (preferably no) disassembly, and you don't want moving parts like floats or fragile things like measuring water level with metal strips because those will break within a year or two; or faster if you don't have a water softening device in you house.

Overall, I think humidification is a job of proper devices that are part of the indoor climate control system along with heating and cooling, but I don't know of residential systems that combine all, and if they do/would exist, it would be much more expensive than the few 100 at most people want to spend on this, and require extensive plumbing to get installed.