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What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

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Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm well aware of why people don't like hearing they basically want slave labor. They don’t like it because it’s a bald faced lie. You’re accusing them of supporting slavery. Just a quick refresher on what slavery is (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery ) > Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave, who is someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is t…

>I bought the Harry Potter books because of the world she built, not because of her writing ability. Risible. What made that world if not the writing? The Harry Potter Wikipedia contains all the substantial plots, characters, worlds they inhabit. Same world. Pay for that, would you? Read that for pleasure, would you?

JK Rowling rewrote the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book something like twenty times. She has said that if you read all drafts of her first chapter you would know the entire plot.

The story supposedly came to her in a flash "fully formed," I think on a train trip. And then she worked -- for a long time -- at trying to figure out how to tell that story well in written form.

Before the Harry Potter books, writing for children's books hardly paid anything. The series was so good that it changed the industry.

One of the things about good writing is that it's something even a poor person can do.

JK Rowling was on welfare while writing the first Harry Potter book, living in some kind of government housing for poor people I think. She would take her small child for a walk in a stroller and when the kid fell asleep she would go to coffee shop or eatery owned by friends and sit and write and joke that "When I'm famous, your place will get famous as the place I wrote the book."

Telling stories via film tends to take money for equipment if nothing else. Not paying independent writers adequately is not only a means to undermine democracy, it's also a form of class warfare.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience here. My conclusion was that the Honneywell model is just a vehicle to sell more filters, which are not that cheap in the long run. Tired of the moldy mess, we too now run an ultrasonic mist'er. I can't say it makes a big difference, but it is quiet. Also routinely airing the bedroom with window open and ceiling fan spinning before the bedtime. Ah, also had to plug that toxic bright blue light on our…

> My conclusion was that the Honneywell model is just a vehicle to sell more filters, which are not that cheap in the long run. This is every air quality device in the industry. I have an old vornado air purifier that uses furnace filters for its media. $30 for the allergen level filters, when I can find them. When the electronics crap out in that thing will be when I learn to repair fans. I had a prototype I built b…

> This is every air quality device in the industry.

I did not have much exposure to many. Previous to the Honneywell we had the "boiler" kind of humidifier, the one that uses two graphite electrodes submerged into water tank. Not many consumables, except that this does not work much, unless one keeps it right at their noses (as pictured on the box :). The electrodes develop some grime eventually which further decreases 'efficiency', but can be cleaned somewhat.

As for the ultrasonic one we use now, there does not seem to be any consumables as such. Maybe the ultrasonic element itself. In three years of seasonal use I can notice some either corrosion or build up on the black ring of the element, but not much difference from that.

There is some kind of filter ring, made of hard plastic, filled with small beads. But as I said in the 3 years we had no reasons to change it. Clean it, yes, but not replace it like with Honneywell.

Cleaning the thing is a drag as always. Two usual problems: the reddish mold above the waterline and inside the "gorge" and nozzle. Also the limescale, though a moderate one. We fill it with just the cold tap water, which is not too bad here.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#294
post #249

After years of garbage humidifiers, I made my own. It cost a tiny fraction of the high end models, has huge reservoir, easy to clean, easy to modify and repair. It's a food grade 5 gallon bucket ($3) with a bathroom vent fan ($15) mounted to the lid with a pvc pipe section ($2 maybe) for adapting the fan the wick, a flour sack cloth towel (pack of 10 for $5). A couple of holes in the lid, some creative testing for ho…

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 i…

I guess it depends on your goals. I had a whole house humidifier, and it leaked just enough to cause long term damage. And that's as good as it gets for humidifying your entire house.

Now, I don't care. I just want to sleep well, and my bedroom is the only room that actually really matters for my skin not to be dry and sleep comfortable.

I don't need to add any treatments, chemicals to my bucket system, so I would say it's far and above safer and more effective than all the other systems I've tried.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Warm Mist humidifiers work by boiling water. This has the downside of... well... boiling hot water hanging around the area. But otherwise, these are the simplest and are only ~$20 or $30. Or $0 if you have a pot, a stove, and a tap.

You're going to move your stove to your bedroom and leave it on while you sleep? You're paying $20 to $30 for safety auto-shutoff features so that you can leave these things on all night long, and not have to worry about fumes, fire, or a myriad of other issues. Yeah, its basically equivalent to a pot of boiling water + a stove. But... being able to move it to the locations you need (and safety features to boot) is t…

Depending on the size of your apartment and the amount of air exchange, running it for 20 min before you go to bed may be perfectly sufficient until morning.

But yeah, I see the point. Just wanted to point out this alternative - when it comes to humidifying through boiling, it's a matter of dumping energy into water, and your stove is excellent at doing that quickly. With a regular humidifier, you may need to wait hours until you get the humidity where you want to have it, a stove can be much faster.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#296
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's a shameful beast right now.

Honestly that makes me want to see it even more!

Here's a $15 fan:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Broan-NuTone-50-CFM-Wall-Ceiling...

Cut 2 holes on top of a 5 gallon (food grade) pale lid and stick this in it. Screw/nail/tape a towel on the other side of the lide making a tube of the towel. Fill 2/3 with water. Plug in the fan. (the fan I bought had an actual 120v wall plug built into it.)

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's a shameful beast right now.

So much the better – it will make me more likely go make my own beastly version for my house >-D

Ha, I described it in a neighboring comment. Go for it, I just based mine design on many other like it:

I am more inclined to try a design more similar to this one next time:

https://steemit.com/growing/@guanyu/cheap-diy-humidifier-for...

Another design:

https://www.dudegrows.com/grow-hack-diy-humidifier-bucket/

I think this may have been one of the original designs I saw that sparked trying it myself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxSLbpAwibg

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#298

I own this model, and use it to humidify a small room. I sympathize with the author's complaints with respect to the difficulty of cleaning it, though mine just doesn't need cleaning very often. And the wick DOES get moldy if you let it sit in wet water for weeks on end. But her other complaints puzzle me: I don't find it to be messy to refill. What is she doing wrong? It's even more baffling that she thinks it "does…

I just bought a (different) honeywell humidifier. so far it works, but not as well as I expected. I hoped it would be able to maintain a somewhat stable humidity for the sake of my guitars, but it can't really keep up with the desiccating power of my central heat. I wonder if part of the issue here is mismatched expectations with evaporative humidifiers?

I have never seen relative humidity budge more than a few percent using any portable humidifer. Sitting at 10% here, hard cases with humidity packs is the only way I can keep acoustics in one piece, though as a result I hardly ever play them anymore.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#299

I own this model, and use it to humidify a small room. I sympathize with the author's complaints with respect to the difficulty of cleaning it, though mine just doesn't need cleaning very often. And the wick DOES get moldy if you let it sit in wet water for weeks on end. But her other complaints puzzle me: I don't find it to be messy to refill. What is she doing wrong? It's even more baffling that she thinks it "does…

I just bought a (different) honeywell humidifier. so far it works, but not as well as I expected. I hoped it would be able to maintain a somewhat stable humidity for the sake of my guitars, but it can't really keep up with the desiccating power of my central heat. I wonder if part of the issue here is mismatched expectations with evaporative humidifiers?

I think the problem is your humidifier needs to be able to keep up with the rate of air turnover in your house.

If your humidifier can't push a 1/4 gallon an hour it's probably not doing that much.

I think the wick type humidifiers likely suck because at low humidity the dew point is really low, the wick gets cold and the water doesn't can't evaporate very fast.

Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're reading a causal meaning into "after" that clearly was not intended by the author of Wirecutter's response. They are clearly expressing a simple temporal relation and not a causal one. Please be clear that I have no opinion on the truthfulness of the Wirecutter's response. Perhaps they're truly corrupt as all hell. I have no inside knowledge of how they operate. However, it is absolutely clear you're reading s…

"After" is a temporal word. We have may ways to clearly express cause that could have been used. Generally, one uses "after" to imply cause without explicitly saying it. Instead, Wirecutter has made a factually incorrect statement. That Thing 1 happened, then Thing 2 happened, then Thing 3 happened is not in dispute. Also not in dispute: Thing 3 happened after Thing 2, which happened after Thing 1.

"After" can certainly imply causality but that is not necessarily the case and, from context, we can see it was clearly not the author's intent.
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