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Paper Clay Air Humidifier

maximelouis.com

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#41
post #40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've encountered the same issue (high plastic bottle waste along with high cost). Short of boiling your own water outdoors to avoid polluting the indoor air, it's challenging to find a source for bulk distilled water.

Boiling your water indoors will humidify the air.

Yes, and it will also release the impurities/minerals into the air, which is what we're trying to avoid by using distilled/boiled water.

I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm), and the evaporated minerals are very visible in the air (and it leaves a white residue on the surrounding area).

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#43
post #41
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boiling your water indoors will humidify the air.

Yes, and it will also release the impurities/minerals into the air, which is what we're trying to avoid by using distilled/boiled water. I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm), and the evaporated minerals are very visible in the air (and it leaves a white residue on the surrounding area).

> I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm)

Tangential, but being curious how hard that was relative to mine led me to discover that Thames Water (i.e. only useful to anyone reading in London) has a pretty good page at [0] - a summary on the site itself but the PDF is really worth a look, lots of numbers. Maybe it's a regulatory requirement, but I wouldn't have expected it to be so easy to get so much information from them about my specific (it serves many districts in and around London with different sources and equipment) water supply.

[0]: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/help-and-advice/water-quality/...

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse. The size of the text depends on the height of the window. Resize the window and it quickly becomes illegibly small.

If you're using chrome or it's derivatives, install the extension ZOOM TEXT ONLY. For Firefox no extension is needed on desktop. Google how to do it. For Android Firefox, I use the add-on called LEGIBILITY.

There's built-in "Reader View" in Firefox (both desktop and mobile).

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just salt though. In some countries, the tap water isn't safe to drink, so it's probably not safe to breathe. Also, as another poster pointed out, humidifying a large room in winter requires several liters of water per day. The cost of distilled water would quickly dwarf the cost of the humidifier itself, so other types of humidifiers besides ultrasonic (namely evaporative ones, where the main danger is mold…

Not to mention ecological. I mean, in Poland, I can't find any sensible source of distilled water other than buying 5L plastic bottles of it. I've briefly looked into devices that could make distilled water, but all that I've found was some industrial-grade hardware that costs more than reasonable for personal use.

I have a small under-sink reverse osmosis system for that. Was ~250€. I think it is made in Poland. There are several like that around.

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#46
post #41
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boiling your water indoors will humidify the air.

Yes, and it will also release the impurities/minerals into the air, which is what we're trying to avoid by using distilled/boiled water. I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm), and the evaporated minerals are very visible in the air (and it leaves a white residue on the surrounding area).

Boiling water will not get much of the minerals into the air. This is why distillation works.

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would depend a lot on how much air is moving over it, and the temperature of that air. The surface area of it is pretty large (the whole thing is pretty ginormous also...). The reservoir size is an issue. I share skepticism about this being used in any serious way. An ultrasonic humidifier is going to be smaller, probably cheaper, and run laps around it in terms of output.

A word of warning: ultrasonic humidifiers used with tap water create high levels of indoor air pollution: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51859262_Indoor_par... Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes low-cost air pollution sensors.

Which company? I'm interested in these sensors.

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#48
post #6

This is an art project and nothing more. Humidifying only 600 square feet, the size of a studio apartment, takes about 5 gallons of water per day in winter. [1] The reservoir on this object looks to be no more than two gallons, and I would be truly shocked if it requires even daily refilling. If it actually moved enough water to make a difference, it would be a fundamentally flawed design in requiring multiple comple…

> Humidifying only 600 square feet, the size of a studio apartment, takes about 5 gallons of water per day in winter.

This heavily depends on the ventilation as well. With ERV HVAC[1] it is much easier to keep higher humidity level as some of the moisture is reintroduced in the heat exchanger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I finally got a hygrometer I was amazed at how useless the powered one gallon air humidifiers are. They often can’t raise the humidity percent a single point with the hygrometer right by it in my rooms. If you want to really humidify a room it takes a big industrial sized unit. They had them in the rooms in our Colorado Airbnb cabin and they were totally necessary in the dry mountain air if you didn’t want to wa…

I have a rather small Honeywell cool mist that works well. I use it in our bedrooms and have taken the humidity up 20% easily. This is in the mountains where it's drier than the desert in the winter.

This may also indicate insufficient air exchange (high CO2 level) in your bedroom.

Re: Paper Clay Air Humidifier

#50
post #41
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boiling your water indoors will humidify the air.

Yes, and it will also release the impurities/minerals into the air, which is what we're trying to avoid by using distilled/boiled water. I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm), and the evaporated minerals are very visible in the air (and it leaves a white residue on the surrounding area).

Would filtering it first help with that?
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