Gotta say, I’ve had the Honeywell for a couple years and I’m quite happy with it. I haven’t had any of the problems that the article cites — it works well, easy to clean, easy to refill.
I’d be quite confused about whether article has the same product, except that the photos match my model.
What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
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Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#32As someone living on the east coast and having a very sensitive nose, I have tried different humidifiers and sadly no humidifiers have been perfect. There are three main types of humidifiers:
1. Warm mist humidifiers boil water and generate steam which humidifies the air. But, they are a burn hazard and consume a lot of energy.
2. Cool mist (non ultrasonic) work like miniature swamp coolers. They are essentially fans which draw air through a wet paper wick. The Honeywell mentioned in the article is of this type. The fan is however very underpowered and it doesn’t work well in anything bigger than a small bedroom. Vornado makes a version with a much more powerful fan which works very well in large rooms, but their tanks are finicky and prone to breaking and leaking. The wick absorbs minerals in the water and will eventually have to be replaced.
3. Ultrasonic humidifiers: A vibrating diaphragm will aerosolize water. Unless you use distilled water, minerals in the water will turn into dust and reduce air quality.
I happen to like the non ultrasonic cool mist ones because they use less energy than the warm mist ones and replacing crusty wicks is cheaper than using distilled water in ultrasonic ones. The problem is everything currently on the market has issues. Any company making incremental improvements to existing cool mist humidifiers will probably get a lot of eager buyers.
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#33FWIW I have an AirCare humidifier and no complaints. It has a fan and a big cellulose filter/wick of some sort for the water to evaporate from. Works fine.
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#34Sat in a damp London flat, with condensation permanently dripping down the windows (despite the dehumidifier running virtually 24/7), I struggle to relate to a world where you would deliberately want to put moisture into the air.
And as someone who lives in Brisbane Australia I’m right there in confusion with you!
We run our aircon on the de-humidify setting haha
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#35Cool Mist humidifiers are just hard IMO. 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. 2. Cool Mist humidifiers try to get around the boiling water issue. Since they humidify at room-temperatures, they're a lot more efficient... but now bacteria / mold is growing constantly.…
Convincing water to just evaporate on its own was always going to be a bit tricky. The energy needs to come from somewhere so your best bet is to just get it into contact with enough dry air and hope for the best. Besides if you're trying to restore humidity lost by heating your room then pure energy wise there's not that much difference in evaporating the required amount of water using ambient heat or evaporating th…
Even without a system that has >100% efficiency (i.e. a heat pump), home heating systems often use a source of heat that is significantly less expensive per watt than electricity. (For example, natural gas.)
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#36I have one of these; the complaint about the fan being inaccessible is legitimate, but it's otherwise clean, and easy to clean - the tank and the base can be scrubbed by hand or just thrown in the dishwasher, unlike any vaporizing humidifier I've used. I think the other complaints may be regional - and the fact that the proposed solutions all seem to be vaporizing humidifiers (or boiling water) seems telling.
I got one because in Arizona, the water quality's terrible, but the air is bone-dry to the point it turns your skin to sandpaper. The hard water means that vaporizing humidifiers fill the air with white dust that coats everything, because they vaporize the minerals. Evaporative humidifiers don't; the minerals all end up in the filter. And, while an evaporative humidifier has no trouble going through a full tank of water overnight on the lowest settings in AZ, it phsyically can't oversaturate the air like a sauna in the way that a vaporizing humidifier does.
The air in the north east just doesn't get dry enough (maybe in winter, but then you don't have the AC fighting your humidifier), and if boiling a pot of water is what the author's looking for, an evaporative humidifier just doesn't do that.
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#37I'm in Australia, and I've lived in a lot of areas both inland (hot dry) and coastal and humidifiers are that common here.
What is it in the US that creates the need/demand for Humidifiers?
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#38Cool Mist humidifiers are just hard IMO. 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. 2. Cool Mist humidifiers try to get around the boiling water issue. Since they humidify at room-temperatures, they're a lot more efficient... but now bacteria / mold is growing constantly.…
I just put up with the dryness and static.
Boneco makes ultrasonics I like but the humidity on the other hand makes mold more viable. Plus you have to buy filters and cleaners.
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#39Saying it doesn't work is misleading. If you need to fill it up every so often then it is working. By working I mean it is converting water into vapor, and that's all a humidifier can do. They can't magically make a desert climate humid. Most build-up in humidifiers is due to crappy water. They can't do a whole lot about that either. Yes, they should be easier to clean, but when they are that cheap, then yes, they are easier to just throw away. But you get what you pay for.
Re: What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
#40I had a different Honeywell Humidifier which was hard to clean, didn't humidify enough and made a lovely (read: annoying) gurgling noise every so often.
Last year I got the AairCare 831000. It's basically a large tub with wick and a fan on top. No gurgling, massive capacity, can humidify the whole apartment and you refill it with a bucket (so much easier and less messy). No nooks and crannies to clean and you can basically bleach the whole tub if you want to.