“Did you just buy a humidifier and… turn that into content?” Guilty as charged! But also, it’s been a surprisingly large quality-of-life improvement for me and the topic turned out to be worthy of exploration. I look forward to all the weird towel contraptions you’ll no doubt devise! *On that note! Important extra info lies below!* I was trying to avoid describing one type of humidifier as universally better than another, but I'm not sure I succeeded. Which kind will work the best for you is very, very situational. What struck me most about the evaporative style is simply how effective it is for how simple it is. But, a thing that I totally didn't address (and I, for real, pinky-promise meant to but simply forgot) was the cooling effect of evaporative humidifiers. After all, if it's the same thing as a swamp cooler, doesn't that mean it cools a bit? Well.... kinda. It's complicated by the fact that the ability of swamp coolers to cool depends on how dry the air is, so once these things have brought the humidity up to anything appreciable, that cooling effect is very mild. But it is indeed true that the water "stole" some heat from the air in order to evaporate, so some cooling inevitably occurs. I'll talk about this more casually on Connextras: ua-cam.com/video/HfFAiCMLJ14/v-deo.html
Light dim decal?! Such a thing exists?! OMG I got so excited I had to pause the video and go looking for some. No longer will I have to put black electrician's tape over the bright-enough-to-burn-your-eyes-out LED displays which sort of, you know, negates the convenience of actually having a display to tell you what's going on. The room air purifier we have is particularly egregious, but I've also taken the tape to routers and computer towers. Thank you soooooo much.
Ironically, the blue led's on my bedside clock are so dim I can't see them half the time. Seriously, manufacturers, our eyes just aren't made to see blue light clearly; it scatters too easily, and blends in with morning sunlight. =_=
I was so annoyed at the light in my computer tower's power button I just straight up traced the button and busted out the arduino male female wires to just disconnect them and so now I have a little band of rainbow in my pc :3
Kapton tape is especially good, without the need to buy a specialized product. With its amber color, it greatly dims blue LEDs. I use it on almost anything with a bright blue LED, and it can of course be stacked if one piece isn't enough.
This guy and Lindybeige should do a video on the topic of which colour being better: Brown or Beige... I'm sure they could come to an agreement of some sorts ^^
Here in the Netherlands older homes have porcelain water containers hanging on the radiators, which you fill with water so it evaporates when the heating is on. They're pretty old fashioned, but have the advantage of having no moving parts or maintenance. Plus they often have some classy drawing on them, as old porcelain does.
I had a large humidifier many years ago that had a towel "loop" on a roller. When it ran, a motor rolled the towel down through the water and up in front of the fan. Extremely effective and it held LOTS of water (days). Yes, you could clean the towel (not really a towel but cloth of some sort). The only problem was that once I set it up too high and at night my setback thermostat let the temperature drop below the dewpoint and it rained inside my house. We woke up wet!
@@calebwhite6173 One i use is from Boneco. They are actually called "air washers" locally, rather than just "humidifiers", because, unlike ones shown in the video, they pull air from the top and push it *onto* the wet wick drum (which, thanks to the rotation, holds a lot of straight up water droplets in its cells, not just mild moisture), so the dry and dirty/dusty air gets sucked in, and the clean air with evaporated air gets pushed out! The, now dirty, drum then gets cycled through the water in the pan below, being washed in the process. And those things are bloody effective! After 2-3 weeks of running it, i clean out grayish-yellow water from the bottom, from all of the dust and rest of yucky stuff it washed the air from. I usually keep it running when i do cleaning, especially dusting and vacuuming, and its effect on reducing the dust in the air is nothing short of a miracle. P.S. Not sure of this is shared between all the humidifiers of this type, but the one i use has synthetic wick that can be freely washed in the washing machine, and the bottom part/water tray can be washed in the dishwasher (it doesn't have any sensitive components, jsut a big hunk of plastic with convenient drain holes so the water from the dishwasher leaves when it's upside-down). One downside, at least Boneco ones, are quite pricey - about $300 equivalent for the model with an extra water tank (and not just the tray itself) and without the HEPA filter. $300 is, i suspect, quite a *lot* more than the big humidifier shown in the video costs...
Nice evaporators will have a couple features these lack: 1) a shallow trough just high enough for the wick to draw from rather than a big basin (reduces "unusable" water volume) 2) a UV light which will sterilize the water in the trough to keep it sanitary for longer periods
@@toastedbuuns13 The one I have is a small (one-room) model. Honeywell HCM-350. (out-of-=stock currently?) www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/honeywell-uv-cool-moisture-germ-free-humidifier-black-hcm-350b.htm
yeah I use A huge one for my house and use RODI water with it but always add anti bacteria stuff because that stuff is a breading ground but not as bad as the real ultra sonics.
@@andspenrob I have that one and I can recommend it. I live in Seattle and it has plenty of capability to keep a 800 sq ft condo comfortable in our weather.
UV lights are off dubious efficacy. The problem is that they can't really work once there's a buildup of limescale. So you still need to clean it regularly (once every 3 days or so). The nice thing about HCM-350 is that many of the parts are dishwasher safe, so it makes it easier to clean. There's some pricier humidifiers that require much less frequent cleaning thanks to additives, like the Venta LW15/25. Generally speaking, evaporative humidifiers are going to be easier to clean - but ultrasonic ones can humidify quicker - whereas most evaporative ones have the advantage of staying at 40-60% (ideally you prob. want 50).
@@toastedbuuns13 I got a taotronics that cost about $50 that uses a sonic disc to put the water out. Output is seriously large, like a gallon in a couple of hours. It has changed my life! I usually had once side of my nasal passages clogged all my life until now.
I recently bought a humidifier from AirCare, mostly because of this video, and it looks like someone there watched this video. Most complaints seems to be fixed. It uses a green, less bright display, has a function to run until the water is over (and warns about it on the display) and the entire upper part goes off for cleaning. =D Not perfect but it got better, in my opinion. The model I bought is the AIRCARE MA1201. Thanks for all the information in this video. It helped me a lot since I recently moved to Canada and where I came from we never need a humidifier and I had no idea which one would be a good fit for me.
Reminds me of the guy buying one humidifier off of amazon and amazon kept offering him ads for his newfound humidifier collection 😂 If Technology Connections has 5 of them then I guess it works on some people! 😂
Thank God for steam heat. I've never need a humidifier with my 'fill the air with water' steam heat. Steam heat runs with the baseboards open until the radiator gets hot enough to close a valve. This dumps a lot of steam into the air around the baseboards. It also means anything cold in the house sweats.
I really appreciate that you explained why the air indoors is so much drier in the winter although the air outdoors might be really humid (>90%). It didn't occur to me that the relative humidity decreases dramatically once the cool outside air is sucked into the home by the ventilation system and heated up to room temperature.
Actually though James is the one who owns all the bright coloured cars, wears super bright running shoes, and is Captain Slow. They're kind of opposites who both really love how things work. :P Also I'd love to see them do a show together, talking about camping stoves, or wind mill turbines, or ball bearings or something. Would be excellent.
Lol, I saw that video, too. I've been telling everyone that complains about their dishwasher that using the "pods" doesn't work as well because there is nothing for the prewash. I love this channel.
I'm imagining a wick that can traverse up and down with the aid of a pontoon float on its sides... Get that super duper tank capacity and no pump required and no drizzle sound. The wick could float to the top when the tank is full then slowly drop down (always keeping its bottom 1" or 2" submerged) totally silently 😁👍 Loved this video!
@@samerm8657, that's exactly how Smartmi Air Humidifier 2 works! They use several plastic disks with hexagonal pattern to catch more water as a wick, and this disks placed vertically in tank of water and slowly rotated. Works great as an idea, but in this particular unit manufacturer hided from software humidity limit setting, so if you are not kind of person who want install modified apps on your smartphone I would not recommend buying this one.
When I was a kid, my grandparents had one that was about 4 feet tall with a wick that was essentially a vertical rotating belt. It ran over a fan as it rotated.
@@samerm8657 My uncle has one. Large foam wheel that rotates past the fan. Also great that cleaning out the air. Starts to look like a used air filter.
In your dissection of how to improve upon your humidifier, I reckon rather than add complications like a pump to increase capacity, fine-tuning the wicks to float at near buoyancy might work as a more mechanically simple solution. Like a toilet tank, you could sit the wick on rails and calibrated bouys so it would travel evenly down the water reservoir until emptied. You could probably mock it up with pink insulation foam and some cabinet tracks if you felt so compelled. Thank you as always for an interesting video about things we take for granted!
That may cause a positive feedback loop, though. If the wick dries out, it would become lighter, causing it to sit higher in the water, causing it to get lighter, causing it to sit higher, etc..
@@AsTheStarsFallDown I feel like that could be solved by lowering the buoyancy somewhat. As long as it's touching the water it would sort of be encouraged to continue...well, wicking the water up into the material. It would just have to be calibrated such that the rate of wetting and drying is the same.
As someone who also has to suffer through Illinois winters, and who also has a humidifier set up and running not five feet from his desk, I can 100% agree, humidifiers are a necessity.
@@Supreme_LobsterIt actually helps the air inside retain heat. Water has a very high thermal intertia, I've noticed such a huge difference that my heater runs less than half as often when my air has been humidified. I just run my drier outlet into the house in the winter though, I hate to waste all of that heat and humidity when it's 11°F outside.
They are amazing, last week I put them on all the LED and lit LCDs in my bedroom and that night I had the best sleep I’ve had in a long time. Fell asleep faster.
I watched half of this, realised I'd just bought a DEhumidifier, and knew I should probably should watching as I was learning too many unnecessary things. This guy's brilliant! :D
I live in the Western Rockies, on the line where it becomes technically desert, and the indoor humidity stays at 15% year-round My grandparents heat their house with a wood stove, so they just put a pot of water on a brick on top of it to humidify their house
THANK YOU for the tangent on the unnecessary blue LED lights. I can't STAND LED lights that don't need to be there or that are WAY too bright. Same thing can be said for unnecessary beeps.
Same thing with cheap, panel-mount voltmeters for batteries and such. Not blue, in my case, but putrid neon green ain't much better. Granted, the only one I regularly use I rarely need to use in the dark and it can be shut off, but still. WHY?
I was once in a hotel that had a motion activated light for the bathroom so you didn't have to turn the light on at night... It was BLUE! Literally the worst colour at night! Style over substance
@@philipcorner574 It's not even stylish, because blue LEDs are everywhere, which indicate lack of taste. I personally like green for one color and green/amber or white(dim)/amber. Latter looks more interesting for me
I bought an ultrasonic humidifier a while ago, and it had built-in lighting as an extra bonus. Guess what color scorched my eyes when I turned it on… Who on earth, aside from brothels, wants to use pure monochromatic blue light? It didn't take long before I ordered a set of warm-white LEDs and disassembled the whole damn thing to replace the LEDs. Due to the weird design it was difficult to solder them and I had to fix bad connections twice, but it was absolutely worth it.
Trying to play anything on a 2DS/3DS at night, you almost wish the battery was low. Set the brightness to anything that doesn't hurt your eyes, and to no avail because of that disgustingly bright blue power LED. That and the display on our cable TV box. They even tried making it dim the panel when it's turned off and showing the clock but... not enough for night. The solution was a piece of X-ray sheet that we flip on top of it to sleep. Still bright enough to see the clock anyway.
The Vicks Warm Steam Vaporizer IS an Electrode Boiler. That is why it requires descaling quite often if you have high mineral content in your water. It can also be manually descaled, but the boiler chamber isn't really designed for end user maintenance. If there is too much minerals or salt in your water, this thing will spit water all over the place.
“it’s blue. Why is it blue?” Yes, damn it, WHY?!? There goes your night vision, and it’s straining on the eyes. It’s like they get the blue LEDs for free and a subsidy for every LED they can cram into their product.
I believe blue LEDs were the hardest to produce, and the most expensive for a while. That's why they're slingshotting to using them constantly now that they're finally cheap and available. That and most people like blue best. As far as I'm concerned, the problem's the intensity
It is their higher voltage drop. This helps with the design. They want to control those 14 LEDs using the fewest umber of processor pins, so they can use the cheapest little micro controller. Today's microcontrollers can set their pins to three states - high or on, low or off, and as an input, which lets the pin float to any value. They can use these three states to make a small number of pins control a large number of LEDs, using something called tri-state multiplexing or charlieplexing. Look it up, but the key point here is that you need the voltage to make the LEDs you are using to turn on to be more than half the voltage of the processor. This is important because charlieplexing will, to light various single LEDs, often end up putting power across two other LEDs in series. If the voltage drop was low, those two would also light up. Processors generally run on 5 volts, and blue LEDs need 3 volts to turn on. 2 blue LEDs in series would need 6 volts to turn on, so there's no problem. Red, amber and green LEDs run on 1 to 2 volts. If a product wants to use other coloured LEDs, they would use a blue or even a near ultra-violet LED to pump a coloured phosphor. But this is more expensive. So blue LEDs are used because, for the design, they are cheapest.
Unfortunately it's cheaper to build, and since i can't read anything in bright blue (seriously, i have a clock with a blue 7 segment display only for show bcouse its just impossible for me to read), i really miss the old red leds on stuff...
@@Roalethiago Red lenses were used by the military for flash lights, since red light damages one's "night vision" (natural ability to see in the dark with minimal light, anyways) less than other colors, and blue light has been proven to stimulate the brain and hinder the release of melatonin (a chemical that helps you sleep). I'm totally down with "vintage" red on every LED. 👍
To address the mold growth issue, Honeywell includes a UV-C light source and a clever zigzag portion for the water to pass under it on the way to the wick on the model HCM-350. The wick lasts MUCH longer in this unit than previous ones I've owned.
I'be been growing mushrooms for almost a decade now, and they for example require a minimum of about 86% humidity to fruit, and close to 91% to primodia pin. I've used almost every type of humidity, from slashing water on textured ground, to cheap humidifiers, to ultrasonic discs and even low psi high pressure misting pumps. It is a great point to share how the humidity acts between warm and cold weather, which is why I always have a charging room before my grow rooms where I'll have a diy swamp cooler in conjunction with a heater to add some base level humidity, then the air volume gets pushed past the ultrasonic discs to help it effectively add the bulk of the humidity more easily, since mushroom grow rooms need 6 cycles of air per hour, since mushroms breath oxygen and produce carbondioxide that needs to be removed with a fan, which makes holding high humidity hard since it can be so fleeting depending on outdoor temps. Something to consider in regards to limescale in humidifiers, the cheap ones can get clogged if you use it excessively, and the safety off switch when they run out of water can get jammed from the scaling, which causes the device to continue operate even without water. This can cause fires if the device is designed to cool itself with the water in it's reservior, and provides a nice electrical fire smell to watch out for. The best humidiier is an ink bird humidiy meter with a house of hydro 3 disc ultrasonic, in a bucket with a 120cfm CPU fan blowing into it (with a air flow check valvue, aka flap of aluminum) and a timer for 3-4minutes on 6-7min off, this setup will turk a 8x10x8ft room into 86%+ humidity with a 160cfm fan pushing air constantly. I use a float value in there too, and have a flow and psi meter incase a hose breaks
@@jojustjo370how I deal with it in my ultrasonic humidifier is I prefilter the water through a zerowater filter. Their claims are 0ppm after filtering and project farm reviewed the filter ang got the same results. It's worked great for me so far
@@jojustjo370I'm not original guy, but I really like ultrasonic as well. The truth for me is I have really good water for it from municipal supply. It's quite low in dissolved solids, just cause of its source being a great lake. Conversely, this fucking sucks for fish keeping, because water changes don't boost the dissolved minerals that are helpful for plant and fish growth. So I have to dose those in
The device you are looking for is a clothes drying rack, what my parents used before we had a clothes dryer (and after too.) FYI If the console ever fails to maintain the desired humidity level, roll it near a hot air furnace vent to improve the rate of evaporation. Be prepared to fill the tank more than once a day. When mine goes dry I fill both the tank and the reservoir!
But for the desired functionality, you want a clothes drying rack placed in a way that the clothes on top stay wet from another water source, like a bucket or bowl
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023 Depending on the height of the drying rack and the type of material, just the one bowl might be enough. If not, some drying racks have parallel rails, so placing a board across higher rails could provide a platform for a second bowl.
Throughout Europe, drying racks are still super common, more common than dryers. Also in most of Europe, Luft is a thing. We open windows and doors in the house everyday for 10 minutes, no matter if it's summer or winter. This is to reduce mold.
In Germany, we have little ceramic containers that can be hung onto the radiator and are filled with water. But usually it is enough that we dry our clothes indoor in winter...
I recently moved from the very rainy Portland area to the mountains of the BC interior. I was not prepared for how dry the winter would be. We managed to find a steal of a deal on a lightly-used Honeywell single [large] room unit, and while the proprietary wicks are ridiculously expensive, they don’t need to be replaced very often because the humidifier has a genius feature: a UV bulb that sits over the water pool just before the wick! It never gets musty, and the wick only develops very faint mildewy smell after a couple months of daily use. You can really only smell it if you bring it right up to your nose, and a good rinse will almost completely get the smell out. I love this thing, it’s so low maintenance and easily keeps our bedroom at 50-60% with the door cracked open.
I remember at my grandmothers house they just used ceramic containers hanging on the radiators.....fill with water and as soon as the heating came on, water started evaporating. They do get gross though.
That sounds simpler to clean though, depending on the shape of the container. My problem with humidifiers is all the nooks and crannies that if not cleaned seemed to get slimy and gross.
I now remember that at my parent's place, we used to have these plastic containers you could hang onto the radiator with hooks and fill them with water. The heat coming off the radiator ended up making the plastic porous and they started leaking. Fun times!
The mist ones which throw minerals can also throw sodium into your air. I had one for a while and all the natural gas flames in the house turned orange. A lighter inside and outside indicated it was in the air and not the gas, so a little armature spectroscopy let me work out sodium with my HPS lamp as a reference. That was a satisfying day.
@@fackloar The main problem is that all of the minerals in the water that evaporates will turn into dust, very very small dust at that. It might be fine, it might depend on the specific minerals in your water, or it might just be a big problem. All the studies so far mainly seem to point out that, yes, if you use an ultrasonic humidifier with tap water you get a massive increase in very small dust particles in the air. It's problem a good idea to stick to the safe side and either not use ultrasonic humidifiers, or use them with demineralised water. Keep in mind, this isn't the same as water-softening, some water softening systems still leave plenty of minerals in the water, just not the ones that cause scale.
The idea to jam the float switch into the ‘on’ position works great. I lived in the Mojave for some time and had two of the humidifiers for both sides of my house and I rigged both to be ‘always on’ by taping a plastic bottle cap into the divot thus keeping the switch up. I always wanted to make a new wick though for all the reasons you mention, and another one you didn’t: the manufacturers can institute planned obsolescence by simply stopping production of the wick and changing the slightest aspect for newer models… which can render a perfectly functional humidifier obsolete.
@@puckcat22679 its the method used for maintaining the swimming pools,you add table salt,apply the electrical current by electrodes,and voila,you chlorinated water NaCl + H2O + ENERGY → NaOCl + H2 they also used it to produce sodium hypochlorite from seawater.
Just got theBrown Aircare Large Console you highlighted in this video! They have completely redesigned the interior. I am certain it is because of this video. No longer any tank… 4 wicks and two fans side by side. Even the Blue LED is not very bright! Well Done!
"I had a bit of an Epiphany in recent days." Yeah it was January 6th. You think they'd have a stand alone evaporative humidifier with the ability to be hooked up to supply water, but I guess that starts to get into the realm of those installed ones.
The fact that you called out the bright-ass LED display lights got me instantly to subscribe. Drives me insane, I feel like a crazy person putting tape on all my electronic devices just so they stop using up my brain's attention pointlessly.
Blue LED displays bug me because the blue lights seem to scatter much more that other colours. Looking at my microwave from across the room the display always looks very fuzzy.
My cpap (a machine that helps you breathe when you sleep) has the lumen output of the sun. I literally have duct tape and cardboard over the display and light still leaks out. So I also put a towel over that.
I had a friend with an expensive Schimmel piano. The room where it was kept had a humidifier and a dehumidifier. That humidifier was a console with a large, slowly spinning, perforated disk. It had one side basically summerged and rotated as a fan blew on it. It reminded me of a small-holed of an old-fashioned bubble blowing machine. It seemed to work very quickly.
A thought on your high-wick proposal: what about a wick that rests in a floating rack on rails? If the floats were calibrated right (something that could be adjusted by putting them on arms that could be moved) it'd keep a consistent amount of the wick below the waterline across most water-level ranges. The rails would keep it in the right horizontal position.
I have a Kenmore console humidifier from the 1990s that does just that. The floats are just hollow air-filled plastic, and they have grooves that fit in a couple of plastic flanges on the side of the tub. There's two fans and two pads per fan, for a total of four pads roughly 10" x 10" x 2". The pads go in box-like assemblies on top of the float, and those assemblies have round sleeves above that also sleeve over a shaft dropping below each fan. Here's an exploded diagram: www.appliancefactoryparts.com/humidifiers/kenmore/758-144521.html The float is #32. Oddly it shows jugs as a part as well, but while I can see in mine that there's tabs cast into the bottom of the tub to accept jugs and open the little spring-loaded valve at the bottom, I have the splash guard #45 for regular filling with a bucket, which I don't think can be there if jugs were used. Also why would you even need the float if you have jugs that maintain a constant water level in the tub? Maybe the jugs were optional.
24:15 One simple solution could be a floating wick assembly. This way the wick would always be on top of the water, and that would not require a pump either.
That's a good idea, maybe having the entire assembly on floating 'rails' connected to the sides of the tank, keeping the fan at a constant effective rate as well Edit: now that i re-read your comment it has hit me that was probably what you were saying, apologies about that
I scrolled to find this comment! You could likely just add poly foam or cut up pool noodle to make that wick, glue some thin strips along the inside of the bucket to trap the wick in a channel if it tries to wiggle around
I am VERY sensitive to mold and bacterial growth and I've always been frustrated at how easily most humidifiers seem to grow mold especially if you live in an apartment (where cleanliness isn't always up to you if you have dirty neighbors next door sharing an air vent). I LOVE the idea of a towel rack humidifier. I found a small plastic dish rack that folds out accordion style and I plan to find a way to make it stand on its side (probably with pvc pipes over the feet) to hang over a bowl. THIS WILL BE A GAME CHANGER for me. My sinuses will get so dry in winter that I get nose bleeds. I am looking forward to a nose bleed free winter! Also your rant on blue LED displays for humidifiers is 100% valid and warranted. I cannot sleep with lose damn lights constantly glowing!!
I'm a guitar maker/restorer in Las Vegas AKA the freaking desert. We moved here about 2 years ago and the climate presented challenges, mainly how to maintain about 40% RH in the desert that stays about
I live in Vegas and keep my apartment humid with a two bucket swamp cooler that I built originally for burning man. It has a pump on the bottom and flows water from bottom to top over cooling pads. My whole apartment can stay at +55% and it doesn't even run all the time. If I run it constantly it goes through about 5 gallons of water in less than 24 hours.
Just check the specs before you buy a humidifier. There are also online calculators that give you the evaporation rate you will need. I have a relatively cheap and small ultrasonic humidifier with 450ml/h evaporation rate. It's enough to sustain about 50% RH with 40 cubic meters per hour ventilation in cold winter (5% RH of heated incoming air). There are more powerful units and I've even seen one for sale with a water pipe connection, although, it was quadruple the price.
I build and repair guitars, and I became concerned with issues with humidity because it can damage a guitar. so I purchased a humidity gauge and I keep an eye on it. like right now it's at thirty one percent. it also tells the high and low that twenty four period and the temperature and the high and low for it. that was a damm good investment. where I live the humidity is fairly decent but I have seen time's when it's gotten as low as seventeen percent. and up to almost fifty percent so I keep an eye on that gauge. and every once in while I'll have take steps to protect the guitars. and where I live the winter it can be brutal. and really cold temperatures can also damage a guitar. it's like they say a person shouldn't ship guitars in cold temperatures. like especially Gibson guitars with nitro cellulose lacquer finishes it can cause severe finish checking. so I have to say that humidity gauge has been a huge help and a life saver for the guitars no doubt.
His focus on energy usage is misplaced. It's going to take about 2260 kilo joules of energy to convert a kilogram of water into vapor. That energy can come from electricity supplied to the humidifier, or it can come from the air. But that energy has to be supplied regardless. And if the energy comes from the air, then it may be too cool for comfort and your heating system turns on to replace the energy used to evaporate the water used to increase the humidity. So high efficiency humidifier simply means the heating system works more to warm the air back up. Low efficiency means heating system works less. Net result is total energy used is approximately the same.
@@johncochran8497, I think he talked about it and, correctly, said that it's highly likely that your heating system is more efficient than plain resistive electric heating.
You should use Kelvin, and point out that it's *proper* "metric" (SI) units. Or, follow the recent XKCD cartoon about the thermometer settings having everything except Fahrenheit, getting crazier and crazier with each menu option.
Hey Alec! I'm also passionate about humidifiers, and I have a few things to add. Lasko, and previously Hamilton Bay makes a wick humidifier that pumps water up on top of the wick. This is done by an impeller on a shaft connected to the fan, so there aren't significantly more parts to fail, and had several advantages. First, the water flow makes it so you don't need the bacteriostat. They specifically instruct you not to use it. Second, with non circulating humidifiers, after a few weeks, you'll notice minerals have accumulated over the wick, so it stops wicking. Not a problem for the circulating wicking humidifiers. There isn't a waterfall sound, as you suspected there would be, because the wick material breaks the surface tension, water flows silently. There is only fan sound. Another approach I really like is to use PLANTS. Plants require watering daily, and they evaporate that water. Pothos is a good one because it will evaporate as much water as you give it, and when you slow down it will slow down without dying. Fill your house with plants, water them how much you need to be comfortable. Be prepared to shove them into storage outdoors in the summer.
I bought a version of the console humidifier like yours. My rh was 16%!!! I’ve had this humidifier running on high speed for a few hours and already has the first floor up to 40%. I imagine all of the wood work and floors, piano, and guitars will soak up the moisture, so I set it to 55%. After a week or so I’ll set it to 45%. Thank you!
I showed my mom this channel the other day when I came over and the first thing she asked me after we watched a video was "Does he have a video on fax machines? I always wondered how they worked..."
Accuracy of basic hygrometers: I had two cheap, basic hygrometers and a fancy top range from Silva. The cheap one allways agreed, and they also agreed with the one on my humidifier. The high-quality expensive Silva was always off. And in the long run it seemed wrong. I brought the cheap one and the Silva to a professional installator of outdoor scientific meterological instruments, and they tested them for me in a test chamber: The cheap ones were surprisingly good. The Sylva was just crap. I sent the Sylva back to Sweden with a complaint. And I got a new one back that just the same sort of crap.
i love how you take the most uninteresting of topics and make them fascinating. who wouldve thought a 30 minute video about humidifiers would be this interesting.
Those brown box console humidifiers have been available for decades. In the 1960's my dad bought one about the same size. There was a rectangular water basin in the bottom(no bottles) , and a fan in the back, it had a cloth type material like a towel but not as dense that hang inside on a rack and dipped into the water. The fan blew air thru the material and up through the top. It worked really well. Later I had one essentially similar but instead of the cloth it had a big water wheel with foam stretched around the diameter which picked up water as it turned and the fan on the back blew through that. Now you can't find either of those in stores mainly because they didn't need those costly replacement " paper wicks". With the old style from years ago, once you bought the machine that was it , other than the demineralizing chemical.
Instead of the soap dispenser, you could use a bettix bottle to accurately measure your dosage each time. These are commonly used by brewers and aquarium owners. Many people may have seen a similar concept to these with mouthwash bottles marketed for kids. You squeeze the bottle and liquid flows up to where it can be measured. This can then be dispensed by pouring out.
Lol. I thought l had to be the only sane person to do that! Being that you're clearly of a kindred spirit I'll even share my "generation 2.o version" of our masking tape hack. Instead of JUST tape, I've started adding the little colored paper adhesive sticker labels that are for pricing your stuff at yard sales. You can experiment with different combinations of colored stickers to balance out what is usually a horrible color in LED bulbs. A little masking tape, a couple of red stickers, a yellow and an orange one here and there.... And voila! I've actually got a pleasantly warm LED light.
My computer case has a bright white LED behind the power switch that is only on when the computer is on. The case also has a tempered glass panel on the side and vents in the front and back that you can see through. So let that sink in. Apparently, that bright LED is the only way I could ever possibly tell that my computer is on. Certainly not the fact that I can literally see the fan running and the other lights inside the case come on. I’ve had that power light long since covered with a piece of electrical tape, as I’ll usually leave my computer running overnight to render/upload stuff.
@@spartan117zm There is a couple power indicators inside the case of mine. on the motherboard. at least I was able to turn off the RGB lights in bios for when the machine is powered down but plugged in.
Got into the humidifier game last year and ended up getting a SmartMi. It's a 4L "smart" model. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't even use wicks. Instead there's a few dozens textured solid plastic discs rotating in the reservoir. The discs pull the water in front of the fan which proceeds to evaporate it. Power consumption is great too: about 8W over 12h to go through the reservoir, or roughly 91Wh/gallon. Very quiet too. The reservoir is one large, square bucket with little to no crannies and nooks, so it is very easy to clean, and the discs can be simply popped into the dishwasher (or hand scrubbed). I also really like the minimal aesthetics of the product. Venta makes similar products, although some of their models have filters and "hygiene discs" that need frequent replacing, and Desert Spring manufactures a Furnace Humidifier, also disc-based and meant to be attached to central HVAC.
Floating wick! Make it to the wick container floats on the water with a little bit of its bottom submerged, and slowly sinks down as the water is depleted. That way you can have much greater tank capacity while maintaining maximum wick surface area
Its gotten way better recently, and I think it's because he doesn't get it cut so short(cuz of the pandemic he maybe doesnt go to the barber shop), longer hair really suits him better.
this has been said a million times before but, i love how informative and concise these videos are, all the while taking into account alternatives and other options to what you're discussing. i live in miami, florida- i literally couldnt physically have more moisture in my air. and yet, my first thought when watching this was, "wow, id love to try that homemade humidifier idea," before quickly realizing that i'd end up killing myself via heat exhaustion if i tried that here. tips for the mainly discussed product, cheaper alternatives AND considerations for their quirks, all alongside mentioning economic options AND under 30 minutes. this channel is absolutely golden
I lived in the Midwest my whole life, or up until a couple years ago, and we NEVER had a Menards. My grandma's town had one, so I knew of Menards, but we didn't have one within 100 miles. I recently went to visit my parents, now they have 2, 2!
Of course the Vicks product is an electrode boiler! You’re just too young to remember the ones we had in our houses in the 60s. The tank was basically a clear jar and the electrodes sat down directly in the water. You cleaned them every week or so with a screwdriver. When it was not plugged in, of course.
Yeah, I used one of these when I was sick with whooping cough and the dry air was making it worse. You could, with enough salt, get it to go through the entire tank in just an hour or less, and it got my room so humid that it was condensing on the windows. Plus, boiling has the added advantage of ensuring the mist is nice and clean and sterile, unlike the high frequency vaporiser type. And since those seemed to be the only two models available in stores around here, it was the obvious choice.
I grew up in the 2000s and we had one of those too from when my Dad was a kid. Probably the best thing to use when you have a nasty cold. (Vicks on the chest, and the humidifier with vicks on it)
The sparks from the shorted electrodes helps blast off more crud, cleaning them with it running is more efficient. *This is satire, please don't do this*
Getting zapped with static electricity and reducing damage to electronics is reason enough to have a humidifier for me. Thanks for the content. Really enjoy your videos.
24:30 . An improvement to your idea instead of a pump . Have the wick sit on a vertical rails and add floats to both side of the wick at the desired height for peak efficiency
At least it's not as bad as it used to be, when blue LEDs first hit the market manufacturers would put them in everything, often it wasn't an indicator or anything it was just a random bright blue light just for the sake of having a random bright blue light
@@RailBuffRob I was in Europe in a nice hotel.... the stupid internet TV box... Superbright white LED was ON when in standby. It would turn OFF when the unit was on. 25,000 MCD 10 degree dispersion ice white LED to light up the room at night.
In a previous job we often tested (TV) set-top boxes. One of them we were working on for a while had a tiny surface-mount blue LED. It was so bright that we'd tape over it so we didn't get after-images looking anywhere near it. Between the common super bright LEDs and the common LEDs that are *on* when the unit is *off* and vice-versa - who came up with that anyway?
also, I read an article a week or so ago that said: new research might show that dry, cold air negatively impacts the native microbe flora in our noses, making it easier for pathogens to get into our bodies and make us ill. I didn't read the study myself but this would definitely make sense to me! Yay humidifiers
13:46 - Thank you. Knowing someone else hates this as much as I do was extremely cathartic. If I had wanted a night light, I'd have just bought a night light. Instead I have to buy dimming and blackout sheets so the other products I buy aren't also night lights.
The burning question is were those replacement wicks priced dramatically lower than they might have been elsewhere? In other words, did you save big money at Menards?
I did the “wet towel” budget humidifier once when I didn’t have access to a real one - it worked like a charm! Though it required hanging three damp bath towels in a small room…definitely a “cheapskate college kid” solution, but it’s vindicating to see the same thing recommended here!
It annoys the piss out of me. And it's not even particularly the fact that every appliance manafacturer uses blue leds, but the fact that they're always overly bright and not diffused at all. Some of them are even straight light beams for god's sake... What happened to the days that electronic manafacturers just put normal, nicely diffused led's that just emit enough light to be seen when looked at and not light up any objects in the dark? They're purpose is serve as status indicators for a product, not to be meant for some kind of light show for christ's sake...
@@Aomicplane It's not for lack of complaint, that's for sure. People have been complaining about overly bright blue light indicators on electronics for quite literally the entire 21st century.
@@z-beeblebrox Blue LEDs are usually the worst offenders, but these days they even use other color LEDs that can be as offensively bright. I recently got a coffee machine as a gift, which has both a green LED and red LED. These LEDs are of the SMD kind and are covered by a transparent piece of plastic with 0 diffusing. These literally light the whole kitchen and even part of the living room when the lights are out. Seriously how hard is it for manafacturers to spend like 1 or 2 dollars more on either decent diffusing, a LED which is by itself already diffused (these are actually purposely made to be used as status lights) or if they really want to be cost-saving just a proper resistor?
@@Aomicplane Cost efficient circuit design is actually why they are using such strong SMD LEDs. If they used a weaker LED they would need much more robust AC to DC circuitry, especially in the case of a mains device that does not require a lot of DC power (sub 200ma). Cheap buck transformers tend to flicker LEDs at very low currents, even more so on 7 Segment displays (due to the variability of current draw depending on the lit segments). The solution to the induced common ground noise/spurious conduction is simple, yet costly on an economy of scale. You'd have to add at least a few resistors and relays, and then, most importantly, deal with the heat generated. This also would involve additional lot testing, different enclosure and PCB specs. Hence, just make that LED "soak" all the current it can to lessen the possibility of flicker, generated heat, and use less components in the process.
@@patricktrudeau1996 - I'm not buying any of that difficulty of design. I believe the super bright LEDs are used because the stuff is coming from China and there is no feedback from consumer to manufacturer.
Here in New England, we try to hang laundry as much as we can. During the warmer months, that means a clothesline outside. In the winter, we use folding wooden racks. Typically they are in the bedrooms, but when we do a significant amount of laundry you'll see them in the other rooms too. Not the best for when company is over, but effective. Not only does this nearly eliminate the use of the clothes dryer (still used in warmer months when it's wet out, but only when really needed) but, it has the added benefit of keeping the home's humidity at a comfortable level. Typically we have about a load a day for the 4 people in the house with sheets and towels included. Not only do we save money not running the dryer, but we also save money in adding humidity. Oh, and we do have a whole house unit built into the forced hot air, but due to all the "ick" that forms, we only used it for one winter back in 1999.
@@alexandreazzalini-machecle4775 I have 2 boys who are in competitive baseball leagues that have year round workouts, active in Boy Scouts, and tend to be outside. As a result, you can have baseball clothes, scout clothes, and school clothes all on the same day. That kind of laundry generation can add up quickly. Add to that at least 2 loads of sheets every week and a load of bath and kitchen towels and getting an average of a load a day isn't too hard.
@@christophersiano969 No offence but your towels and sheets might smell less badly and need washing less frequently if your home wasn't so moist or if your children washed after sports. Just saying. Or maybe it's the chemical high from the laundry products that you crave. Is there some sort of spray-on fabric conditioner you could use instead? (Use a chemical propellant instead of a mechanical atomiser and you get some lovely halogenated hydrocarbons to replace those lovely VOCs from the detergents and doubtless also billowing out from all your reconstituted wood furniture in your no doubt overheated home.)
Long hot shower, a fan blowing hallway air in (and humid air out) ... but it's chilly pulling that curtain back! I also got a pair of ultrasonic humidifiers and keeping them going at like 80% duty cycle is just enough for when it gets down to 20°F (~-5°C). What I don't like is that it cools, just like a swamp cooler, using room heat to supply the latent heat of evaporation.
Don't even have to leave the door open. All of the accumulated humidity will be pushed into the rest of the house/apt in a couple of cycles (forced-air heating required). Slower if radiative heat due to natural convection. Bathroom power exhaust events, negate this in summer. I'm an oddball, and actually run my bathroom vent most months during winter, nearly 24/7. Mitigates condensation/frosting (prevents rotting) of my window frames. (my RH is always under 30% in winter, I monitor it) And no, my mo. gas bill is still in the double digits in the northern midwest in jan/feb, & I'm blessed without itchy skin.
If you haven’t already explored (in the past 3 years since this video came out) the Venta LW45 Comfort Plus humidifier, it’s a huge step up from the Aircare evaporative design, especially for large space humidification. It’s an even MORE simple design, where instead of a replaceable wick, it uses a densely stacked rotating disk turning in the water basin to draw liquid water into the air current. This has pretty nice implications for sanitation since you can toss 90% of the assembly into a dishwasher for deep cleaning, along with the niceties of never having to buy paper wicks that eventually expire into a landfill. I tested the humidification efficacy and it exceeds the performance of the Aircare, as well.
“Did you just buy a humidifier and… turn that into content?”
Guilty as charged! But also, it’s been a surprisingly large quality-of-life improvement for me and the topic turned out to be worthy of exploration. I look forward to all the weird towel contraptions you’ll no doubt devise! *On that note! Important extra info lies below!*
I was trying to avoid describing one type of humidifier as universally better than another, but I'm not sure I succeeded. Which kind will work the best for you is very, very situational. What struck me most about the evaporative style is simply how effective it is for how simple it is.
But, a thing that I totally didn't address (and I, for real, pinky-promise meant to but simply forgot) was the cooling effect of evaporative humidifiers. After all, if it's the same thing as a swamp cooler, doesn't that mean it cools a bit? Well.... kinda. It's complicated by the fact that the ability of swamp coolers to cool depends on how dry the air is, so once these things have brought the humidity up to anything appreciable, that cooling effect is very mild. But it is indeed true that the water "stole" some heat from the air in order to evaporate, so some cooling inevitably occurs. I'll talk about this more casually on Connextras: ua-cam.com/video/HfFAiCMLJ14/v-deo.html
And now you can write it off as a business expense! Clever. :)
hi
Fuk I'm not first
Can you do a video on water purifiers? Please
For what it's worth, dry air gives me nosebleeds.
This channel is secretly a scheme to turn Alec's new homeowner costs into tax deductions. Next week: "how do roofs work?"
That's actually not a terrible idea xD
Amazing 😂😂
I just realised why every UA-camr who does nerdy stuff went for the Tesla roof and battery option.
10/10!
And I only now just learned the host's name after many, many videos.
11:20 "its brown"
correction
"its orange with context"
Well done my friend
I see you are a man of culture!
*dark orange
Wisdom is spreading thanks to Technology connections 👌
If there is anything that Technology Connections and Regular Car Reviews have in common, its *HOT BROWN*
"It is brown, and therefore excellent." I agree, dark orange is my favorite color.
brown is still weird....
*with context
I think he has gone black, and he is not going back.
You mean Dark Yellow Red
I think he and Mr. Regular from Regular Car Reviews would get along well with their mutual affection of BROWN 🟤🟤🟤
Light dim decal?! Such a thing exists?! OMG I got so excited I had to pause the video and go looking for some. No longer will I have to put black electrician's tape over the bright-enough-to-burn-your-eyes-out LED displays which sort of, you know, negates the convenience of actually having a display to tell you what's going on. The room air purifier we have is particularly egregious, but I've also taken the tape to routers and computer towers. Thank you soooooo much.
you can also just get a roll of cheap window tint film and cut small squares to fit whatever you need
Ironically, the blue led's on my bedside clock are so dim I can't see them half the time.
Seriously, manufacturers, our eyes just aren't made to see blue light clearly; it scatters too easily, and blends in with morning sunlight. =_=
@@IamCoalfoot WHY DO YOU HAVE SUCH A BLASPHEMOUS CLOCK!?
I was so annoyed at the light in my computer tower's power button I just straight up traced the button and busted out the arduino male female wires to just disconnect them
and so now I have a little band of rainbow in my pc :3
Kapton tape is especially good, without the need to buy a specialized product. With its amber color, it greatly dims blue LEDs. I use it on almost anything with a bright blue LED, and it can of course be stacked if one piece isn't enough.
"It's Brown, and therefore, excellent."
Technology Connections continues to be a man of refined and elegant taste
it's contextual orange tho
I came here as soon as he said it and I wasn’t disappointed.
This guy and Lindybeige should do a video on the topic of which colour being better: Brown or Beige... I'm sure they could come to an agreement of some sorts ^^
BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN BROWN
with an eye piercing display
Here in the Netherlands older homes have porcelain water containers hanging on the radiators, which you fill with water so it evaporates when the heating is on. They're pretty old fashioned, but have the advantage of having no moving parts or maintenance. Plus they often have some classy drawing on them, as old porcelain does.
An aunt of mine used to have those here in the UK too.
sounds lovely
In Poland you can buy them still in many hardware stores.
My dad, here in the US, had a portable radiator, he just stuck an old pot filled with water on it.
Now I want one to complement my tulip vase. Are the water containers also white and blue? (Is all white and blue called Delft porcelain?)
11:20
No, it’s not brown. It’s orange with context.
Nice throwback. 😎
Not fair !
You changed the output colour by observing its context !
As someone who would have no bias towards this issue, I approve the decision to rename "brown" to "orange with context"
@@OrangeC7 but isn't orange just brown without context?
@@renagonpoi5747 brown without context is orange, but orange can remain orange regardless of context, so no
I had a large humidifier many years ago that had a towel "loop" on a roller. When it ran, a motor rolled the towel down through the water and up in front of the fan. Extremely effective and it held LOTS of water (days). Yes, you could clean the towel (not really a towel but cloth of some sort). The only problem was that once I set it up too high and at night my setback thermostat let the temperature drop below the dewpoint and it rained inside my house. We woke up wet!
Which brand? It sounds effective haha!
im sorry. but thats funny. rainmaker!
@@calebwhite6173 One i use is from Boneco. They are actually called "air washers" locally, rather than just "humidifiers", because, unlike ones shown in the video, they pull air from the top and push it *onto* the wet wick drum (which, thanks to the rotation, holds a lot of straight up water droplets in its cells, not just mild moisture), so the dry and dirty/dusty air gets sucked in, and the clean air with evaporated air gets pushed out!
The, now dirty, drum then gets cycled through the water in the pan below, being washed in the process. And those things are bloody effective! After 2-3 weeks of running it, i clean out grayish-yellow water from the bottom, from all of the dust and rest of yucky stuff it washed the air from. I usually keep it running when i do cleaning, especially dusting and vacuuming, and its effect on reducing the dust in the air is nothing short of a miracle.
P.S. Not sure of this is shared between all the humidifiers of this type, but the one i use has synthetic wick that can be freely washed in the washing machine, and the bottom part/water tray can be washed in the dishwasher (it doesn't have any sensitive components, jsut a big hunk of plastic with convenient drain holes so the water from the dishwasher leaves when it's upside-down).
One downside, at least Boneco ones, are quite pricey - about $300 equivalent for the model with an extra water tank (and not just the tray itself) and without the HEPA filter. $300 is, i suspect, quite a *lot* more than the big humidifier shown in the video costs...
dat not rain dats dew
"It's brown, and therefore, excellent." Definitely one of the best Alec quotes ever. Right up there with So-ny.
That immediately struck me. I think you're right.
Wait, what video is So-ny from? I don't remember that one
@@TheLegoPerson CED part 5 I think.
"Brooooooooooooown" - Regular Car Reviews
The brown video is my favorite of Alec's works
"Here's where things get slightly interesting!" is a really good tagline for this whole channel
Yes but actually, yes.
super easy barely an inconvenience ...
@@runnerr000 LOL, wrong channel?
Sir, not many channels keep my attention for 40 minutes at a time but here I am binging your videos in my spare time. Well done!
Nice evaporators will have a couple features these lack:
1) a shallow trough just high enough for the wick to draw from rather than a big basin (reduces "unusable" water volume)
2) a UV light which will sterilize the water in the trough to keep it sanitary for longer periods
@@toastedbuuns13 The one I have is a small (one-room) model. Honeywell HCM-350. (out-of-=stock currently?) www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/honeywell-uv-cool-moisture-germ-free-humidifier-black-hcm-350b.htm
yeah I use A huge one for my house and use RODI water with it but always add anti bacteria stuff because that stuff is a breading ground but not as bad as the real ultra sonics.
@@andspenrob I have that one and I can recommend it. I live in Seattle and it has plenty of capability to keep a 800 sq ft condo comfortable in our weather.
UV lights are off dubious efficacy. The problem is that they can't really work once there's a buildup of limescale. So you still need to clean it regularly (once every 3 days or so). The nice thing about HCM-350 is that many of the parts are dishwasher safe, so it makes it easier to clean.
There's some pricier humidifiers that require much less frequent cleaning thanks to additives, like the Venta LW15/25.
Generally speaking, evaporative humidifiers are going to be easier to clean - but ultrasonic ones can humidify quicker - whereas most evaporative ones have the advantage of staying at 40-60% (ideally you prob. want 50).
@@toastedbuuns13 I got a taotronics that cost about $50 that uses a sonic disc to put the water out. Output is seriously large, like a gallon in a couple of hours. It has changed my life! I usually had once side of my nasal passages clogged all my life until now.
I recently bought a humidifier from AirCare, mostly because of this video, and it looks like someone there watched this video. Most complaints seems to be fixed. It uses a green, less bright display, has a function to run until the water is over (and warns about it on the display) and the entire upper part goes off for cleaning. =D
Not perfect but it got better, in my opinion. The model I bought is the AIRCARE MA1201.
Thanks for all the information in this video. It helped me a lot since I recently moved to Canada and where I came from we never need a humidifier and I had no idea which one would be a good fit for me.
It wouldnt supruse me if this is a parts bin special product made of things they already have a stock of in the factory
P
"I bought a humidifier last week."- Now has 4 humidifiers.
Five***
Reminds me of the guy buying one humidifier off of amazon and amazon kept offering him ads for his newfound humidifier collection 😂
If Technology Connections has 5 of them then I guess it works on some people! 😂
Next week it'll be 16
Thank God for steam heat. I've never need a humidifier with my 'fill the air with water' steam heat.
Steam heat runs with the baseboards open until the radiator gets hot enough to close a valve. This dumps a lot of steam into the air around the baseboards. It also means anything cold in the house sweats.
For at least some of them, he clearly bought them used or borrowed them from someone. The ultrasonic one has signs of use.
I really appreciate that you explained why the air indoors is so much drier in the winter although the air outdoors might be really humid (>90%). It didn't occur to me that the relative humidity decreases dramatically once the cool outside air is sucked into the home by the ventilation system and heated up to room temperature.
"IT'S BROWN, AND THEREFORE, EXCELLENT"
Technology Connections, the American James May
Actually though James is the one who owns all the bright coloured cars, wears super bright running shoes, and is Captain Slow. They're kind of opposites who both really love how things work. :P
Also I'd love to see them do a show together, talking about camping stoves, or wind mill turbines, or ball bearings or something. Would be excellent.
Oh man, this one got me good.
Came for this comment
YES. YES, YES YES.
I think he meant to say dark orange
Currently watching this while I fill my pre wash detergent compartment on my dishwasher. Love how informative your channel is
Lol, I saw that video, too. I've been telling everyone that complains about their dishwasher that using the "pods" doesn't work as well because there is nothing for the prewash.
I love this channel.
omg so am I LOL
It takes 30 min to fill your detergent how many dishes are you doing?
@@rachelt2415 he didn't watch the latest video about too much detergent apparently
@@rachelt2415 😆
I'm imagining a wick that can traverse up and down with the aid of a pontoon float on its sides... Get that super duper tank capacity and no pump required and no drizzle sound. The wick could float to the top when the tank is full then slowly drop down (always keeping its bottom 1" or 2" submerged) totally silently 😁👍
Loved this video!
Smart concept!
I myself began thinking of a rotating wick instead.
@@samerm8657, that's exactly how Smartmi Air Humidifier 2 works! They use several plastic disks with hexagonal pattern to catch more water as a wick, and this disks placed vertically in tank of water and slowly rotated. Works great as an idea, but in this particular unit manufacturer hided from software humidity limit setting, so if you are not kind of person who want install modified apps on your smartphone I would not recommend buying this one.
@DevianrOllam Glad to see I am not the only one who had this rather obvious thought.
When I was a kid, my grandparents had one that was about 4 feet tall with a wick that was essentially a vertical rotating belt. It ran over a fan as it rotated.
@@samerm8657 My uncle has one. Large foam wheel that rotates past the fan. Also great that cleaning out the air. Starts to look like a used air filter.
In your dissection of how to improve upon your humidifier, I reckon rather than add complications like a pump to increase capacity, fine-tuning the wicks to float at near buoyancy might work as a more mechanically simple solution. Like a toilet tank, you could sit the wick on rails and calibrated bouys so it would travel evenly down the water reservoir until emptied. You could probably mock it up with pink insulation foam and some cabinet tracks if you felt so compelled. Thank you as always for an interesting video about things we take for granted!
You could probably use a tank, reservoir system similar to some pet water fountains have.
That may cause a positive feedback loop, though. If the wick dries out, it would become lighter, causing it to sit higher in the water, causing it to get lighter, causing it to sit higher, etc..
It’s called a DEHUMIDIFIER
@@AsTheStarsFallDown I feel like that could be solved by lowering the buoyancy somewhat. As long as it's touching the water it would sort of be encouraged to continue...well, wicking the water up into the material. It would just have to be calibrated such that the rate of wetting and drying is the same.
The only channel where I would say "Oh! Humidifiers! I gotta watch!", and actually mean it.
I like that he just throws in “quicklier” without skipping a beat.
The blue light display tangent resonated with me, and i'm glad someone feels the same way. It deserves a whole video.
And that little piece of like static-cling window tint he applied, made it look so much better!
Even worse for clocks. You have to go out of your way to get one with dull red light instead of the bright blue that lights up your entire town.
Here in SE Asia many air conditioning units have the bright light. I can't sleep. Blu Tac helps
Same! I cover all of the lights with electrical tape. I set humidity based on comfort, so I don't need to see the number at all.
Blue LED's are the worst.
As someone who also has to suffer through Illinois winters, and who also has a humidifier set up and running not five feet from his desk, I can 100% agree, humidifiers are a necessity.
Oh god I live in the subtropics of the north island of New Zealand so we all have central dehumidifiers not cooling or heating just dehumidifi.
I feel like everything got so much drier when I moved to Boston, is Illinois supposed to be worse?
A necessity for what?
Try living in Nevada. Its almost always 0% humidity. No matter the season.
@@Supreme_LobsterIt actually helps the air inside retain heat. Water has a very high thermal intertia, I've noticed such a huge difference that my heater runs less than half as often when my air has been humidified. I just run my drier outlet into the house in the winter though, I hate to waste all of that heat and humidity when it's 11°F outside.
Not gonna lie, the term "whole-house humidifier" gives me some serious "full bridge rectifier" vibes.
*F U L L B R I D G E R E C T I F I E R*
WhOOOOOOOLE hOUSe huMIDIFYAAAA
Electrolux
Wait no Boom !
@@calebdrake9953 Lmao
"Light dim decal" is a product I didn't know existed and now urgently need.
They are amazing, last week I put them on all the LED and lit LCDs in my bedroom and that night I had the best sleep I’ve had in a long time. Fell asleep faster.
"And the fan makes this go even quicklier". You sir, are a treasure.
CAN WE GET A VIDEO ON DEHUMIDIFIERS??
Turn off caps lock you zoomer
Play it backwards
Oh yes please!
Had a good laugh from this 😂 thank you from across the internet! ❤️
@@KimYoungUn69 lmaoo
A 3d printer would be a great investment for this channel. Being able to test theories could be valuable for content.
"It's Brown, and therefore, excellent."
Brown or, dark orange?
Yes.
Orange with context
same thing
@@andrewsprojectsinnovations6352 Darn, you beat me to it...
As long as it isn't lightish red, we're good.
7:46 "I've apparently uncovered something of a mist-ery"
I see what you did there...
I watched half of this, realised I'd just bought a DEhumidifier, and knew I should probably should watching as I was learning too many unnecessary things.
This guy's brilliant! :D
"It's brown and, therefore, excellent."
Ah, I missed you, Alec.
Excellent advice for buying vintage televisions and hi-if stereos!
Imma going to make one that is completely LED blue and has a wood grain LCD display.
This line just makes me want to see him & Lindybeige together
I'm pretty sure it's just dark orange.
@@whotookgetinthebag You, my friend, are a psychopath.
I live in the Western Rockies, on the line where it becomes technically desert, and the indoor humidity stays at 15% year-round
My grandparents heat their house with a wood stove, so they just put a pot of water on a brick on top of it to humidify their house
And if the pot drip, you can call it a sauna :D
I do this as well. Here in Rural Vermont it's called a "Yankee Humidifier".
THANK YOU for the tangent on the unnecessary blue LED lights. I can't STAND LED lights that don't need to be there or that are WAY too bright. Same thing can be said for unnecessary beeps.
Same thing with cheap, panel-mount voltmeters for batteries and such. Not blue, in my case, but putrid neon green ain't much better. Granted, the only one I regularly use I rarely need to use in the dark and it can be shut off, but still. WHY?
I was once in a hotel that had a motion activated light for the bathroom so you didn't have to turn the light on at night... It was BLUE! Literally the worst colour at night! Style over substance
@@philipcorner574 It's not even stylish, because blue LEDs are everywhere, which indicate lack of taste. I personally like green for one color and green/amber or white(dim)/amber. Latter looks more interesting for me
I bought an ultrasonic humidifier a while ago, and it had built-in lighting as an extra bonus. Guess what color scorched my eyes when I turned it on… Who on earth, aside from brothels, wants to use pure monochromatic blue light? It didn't take long before I ordered a set of warm-white LEDs and disassembled the whole damn thing to replace the LEDs. Due to the weird design it was difficult to solder them and I had to fix bad connections twice, but it was absolutely worth it.
Trying to play anything on a 2DS/3DS at night, you almost wish the battery was low. Set the brightness to anything that doesn't hurt your eyes, and to no avail because of that disgustingly bright blue power LED.
That and the display on our cable TV box. They even tried making it dim the panel when it's turned off and showing the clock but... not enough for night. The solution was a piece of X-ray sheet that we flip on top of it to sleep. Still bright enough to see the clock anyway.
The Vicks Warm Steam Vaporizer IS an Electrode Boiler. That is why it requires descaling quite often if you have high mineral content in your water. It can also be manually descaled, but the boiler chamber isn't really designed for end user maintenance. If there is too much minerals or salt in your water, this thing will spit water all over the place.
“it’s blue. Why is it blue?”
Yes, damn it, WHY?!? There goes your night vision, and it’s straining on the eyes. It’s like they get the blue LEDs for free and a subsidy for every LED they can cram into their product.
I believe blue LEDs were the hardest to produce, and the most expensive for a while. That's why they're slingshotting to using them constantly now that they're finally cheap and available. That and most people like blue best.
As far as I'm concerned, the problem's the intensity
It is their higher voltage drop. This helps with the design.
They want to control those 14 LEDs using the fewest umber of processor pins, so they can use the cheapest little micro controller. Today's microcontrollers can set their pins to three states - high or on, low or off, and as an input, which lets the pin float to any value. They can use these three states to make a small number of pins control a large number of LEDs, using something called tri-state multiplexing or charlieplexing. Look it up, but the key point here is that you need the voltage to make the LEDs you are using to turn on to be more than half the voltage of the processor. This is important because charlieplexing will, to light various single LEDs, often end up putting power across two other LEDs in series. If the voltage drop was low, those two would also light up.
Processors generally run on 5 volts, and blue LEDs need 3 volts to turn on. 2 blue LEDs in series would need 6 volts to turn on, so there's no problem. Red, amber and green LEDs run on 1 to 2 volts. If a product wants to use other coloured LEDs, they would use a blue or even a near ultra-violet LED to pump a coloured phosphor. But this is more expensive.
So blue LEDs are used because, for the design, they are cheapest.
@@robertbackhaus8911 Fascinating, thank you!
Unfortunately it's cheaper to build, and since i can't read anything in bright blue (seriously, i have a clock with a blue 7 segment display only for show bcouse its just impossible for me to read), i really miss the old red leds on stuff...
@@Roalethiago Red lenses were used by the military for flash lights, since red light damages one's "night vision" (natural ability to see in the dark with minimal light, anyways) less than other colors, and blue light has been proven to stimulate the brain and hinder the release of melatonin (a chemical that helps you sleep). I'm totally down with "vintage" red on every LED. 👍
As someone who just moved out and needed to get new appliances and understand them, your recent stuff has been a godsend
To address the mold growth issue, Honeywell includes a UV-C light source and a clever zigzag portion for the water to pass under it on the way to the wick on the model HCM-350. The wick lasts MUCH longer in this unit than previous ones I've owned.
I'be been growing mushrooms for almost a decade now, and they for example require a minimum of about 86% humidity to fruit, and close to 91% to primodia pin.
I've used almost every type of humidity, from slashing water on textured ground, to cheap humidifiers, to ultrasonic discs and even low psi high pressure misting pumps.
It is a great point to share how the humidity acts between warm and cold weather, which is why I always have a charging room before my grow rooms where I'll have a diy swamp cooler in conjunction with a heater to add some base level humidity, then the air volume gets pushed past the ultrasonic discs to help it effectively add the bulk of the humidity more easily, since mushroom grow rooms need 6 cycles of air per hour, since mushroms breath oxygen and produce carbondioxide that needs to be removed with a fan, which makes holding high humidity hard since it can be so fleeting depending on outdoor temps.
Something to consider in regards to limescale in humidifiers, the cheap ones can get clogged if you use it excessively, and the safety off switch when they run out of water can get jammed from the scaling, which causes the device to continue operate even without water. This can cause fires if the device is designed to cool itself with the water in it's reservior, and provides a nice electrical fire smell to watch out for.
The best humidiier is an ink bird humidiy meter with a house of hydro 3 disc ultrasonic, in a bucket with a 120cfm CPU fan blowing into it (with a air flow check valvue, aka flap of aluminum) and a timer for 3-4minutes on 6-7min off, this setup will turk a 8x10x8ft room into 86%+ humidity with a 160cfm fan pushing air constantly. I use a float value in there too, and have a flow and psi meter incase a hose breaks
@@jojustjo370how I deal with it in my ultrasonic humidifier is I prefilter the water through a zerowater filter. Their claims are 0ppm after filtering and project farm reviewed the filter ang got the same results. It's worked great for me so far
@@jojustjo370I'm not original guy, but I really like ultrasonic as well. The truth for me is I have really good water for it from municipal supply. It's quite low in dissolved solids, just cause of its source being a great lake.
Conversely, this fucking sucks for fish keeping, because water changes don't boost the dissolved minerals that are helpful for plant and fish growth. So I have to dose those in
This man's impression of water glugging at 18:05 is first rate.
Yes, how long has he practiced that?
We need bloopers
Worthy of an Emmy at the very least.
Honestly, his sound effect sounded *more* like water "glugging" than the humidifier did!
Haha I thought that too. 😂
The device you are looking for is a clothes drying rack, what my parents used before we had a clothes dryer (and after too.)
FYI If the console ever fails to maintain the desired humidity level, roll it near a hot air furnace vent to improve the rate of evaporation. Be prepared to fill the tank more than once a day. When mine goes dry I fill both the tank and the reservoir!
But for the desired functionality, you want a clothes drying rack placed in a way that the clothes on top stay wet from another water source, like a bucket or bowl
@@hanneswiggenhorn2023 Depending on the height of the drying rack and the type of material, just the one bowl might be enough. If not, some drying racks have parallel rails, so placing a board across higher rails could provide a platform for a second bowl.
Throughout Europe, drying racks are still super common, more common than dryers.
Also in most of Europe, Luft is a thing. We open windows and doors in the house everyday for 10 minutes, no matter if it's summer or winter. This is to reduce mold.
In Germany, we have little ceramic containers that can be hung onto the radiator and are filled with water. But usually it is enough that we dry our clothes indoor in winter...
I recently moved from the very rainy Portland area to the mountains of the BC interior. I was not prepared for how dry the winter would be.
We managed to find a steal of a deal on a lightly-used Honeywell single [large] room unit, and while the proprietary wicks are ridiculously expensive, they don’t need to be replaced very often because the humidifier has a genius feature: a UV bulb that sits over the water pool just before the wick! It never gets musty, and the wick only develops very faint mildewy smell after a couple months of daily use. You can really only smell it if you bring it right up to your nose, and a good rinse will almost completely get the smell out. I love this thing, it’s so low maintenance and easily keeps our bedroom at 50-60% with the door cracked open.
"It's brown, and therefore, excellent."
I love this channel
BBC
oh you mean darker orange?
"This is John... I mean... The Wick."
As soon as i saw it's color i knew he would say something about it. Really like this humor.
I remember at my grandmothers house they just used ceramic containers hanging on the radiators.....fill with water and as soon as the heating came on, water started evaporating.
They do get gross though.
Same! We also put a pot of water on a wood stove!
That sounds simpler to clean though, depending on the shape of the container. My problem with humidifiers is all the nooks and crannies that if not cleaned seemed to get slimy and gross.
Thanks, you just reminded me I have to fill mine!
I now remember that at my parent's place, we used to have these plastic containers you could hang onto the radiator with hooks and fill them with water. The heat coming off the radiator ended up making the plastic porous and they started leaking. Fun times!
@@allawa we just line dry out clothes inside
cool, but when can we expect a dehumidifier episode coming out? I'd love to hear you ramble about those!
Running the two devices next to each other is a recipe for all kinds of WINNING
Thunderfoot bursts through the door "NOT! ENERGY! EFFICIENT!!!!!!".
@@harpingon Wireless (or pipeless?) water transmission: it's wifi, for water!!
@@diegosanchez894 hahahahahaha
The mist ones which throw minerals can also throw sodium into your air. I had one for a while and all the natural gas flames in the house turned orange. A lighter inside and outside indicated it was in the air and not the gas, so a little armature spectroscopy let me work out sodium with my HPS lamp as a reference. That was a satisfying day.
Use pure distilled water, that way there won't be any minerals in it.
@@pickledfur spotted the cheese grater connoisseur
@@Cobalt985 :]
Is it bad for you to have sodium in the air?
@@fackloar The main problem is that all of the minerals in the water that evaporates will turn into dust, very very small dust at that. It might be fine, it might depend on the specific minerals in your water, or it might just be a big problem. All the studies so far mainly seem to point out that, yes, if you use an ultrasonic humidifier with tap water you get a massive increase in very small dust particles in the air. It's problem a good idea to stick to the safe side and either not use ultrasonic humidifiers, or use them with demineralised water. Keep in mind, this isn't the same as water-softening, some water softening systems still leave plenty of minerals in the water, just not the ones that cause scale.
The idea to jam the float switch into the ‘on’ position works great. I lived in the Mojave for some time and had two of the humidifiers for both sides of my house and I rigged both to be ‘always on’ by taping a plastic bottle cap into the divot thus keeping the switch up. I always wanted to make a new wick though for all the reasons you mention, and another one you didn’t: the manufacturers can institute planned obsolescence by simply stopping production of the wick and changing the slightest aspect for newer models… which can render a perfectly functional humidifier obsolete.
This is one of my favorite "the boss is out" at-work channels.
Best part: Boss knows, doesn't care.
Seems to make a great difference if you watch videos or work...
"adding salt" was a dead giveaway that it's an electrode boiler.
it have two carbon rods with electricity running from one to the other by the salty water.
Anyone here a fan of DiodeGoneWild? MORE SAAAAALT!
@@puckcat22679 its the method used for maintaining the swimming pools,you add table salt,apply the electrical current by electrodes,and voila,you chlorinated water
NaCl + H2O + ENERGY → NaOCl + H2
they also used it to produce sodium hypochlorite from seawater.
Yes it is from the owners manual. I have to go buy one, now. "Mooorreee SAAAALLLLTT"
So basically, a "stinger" heater, like convicts make with an extension cord?
why is this channel so soothing
Because it's intelligent information, not a bunch of sensationalism. A breath of fresh, humidified air!
That 3 gallon AirCare humidifier is now trending on home depot LOL
Airfare is spewing mold
I would love to see you do an episode about water softeners. They're pretty interesting and I think they'd fit right in on this channel.
Second this
Gotta say, even knowing how you keep your script on track, i sometimes forget you're even reading a screen. Well done sir.
Just got theBrown Aircare Large Console you highlighted in this video! They have completely redesigned the interior. I am certain it is because of this video. No longer any tank… 4 wicks and two fans side by side. Even the Blue LED is not very bright! Well Done!
When I was little, we heated our house with wood stoves, so there were cast iron kettles simmering on the stove for this purpose.
We still use them.
We used cake or roasting pans set on the wood stove :)
"I had a bit of an Epiphany in recent days." Yeah it was January 6th.
You think they'd have a stand alone evaporative humidifier with the ability to be hooked up to supply water, but I guess that starts to get into the realm of those installed ones.
Ladies and gentlemen and whoever in between, we have reached Clark Kent levels of hair styling in this one.
Only Clark Kent wears glasses.
@@m.degroot6837 well ok this is superman.
Superman in brown suit
I was literally about to comment how great his hair looks in this video
I think his mom did his hair ;D
The fact that you called out the bright-ass LED display lights got me instantly to subscribe. Drives me insane, I feel like a crazy person putting tape on all my electronic devices just so they stop using up my brain's attention pointlessly.
11:45 "...with simulated wood grain excellence."
*Clint Basinger has entered the chat*
LGR also joined the chat
That's who LGR is, Robert
"It needs to be readable, not eye piercing!"
Listen to this man companies!
No, seriously listen to him....
Please
Blue LED displays bug me because the blue lights seem to scatter much more that other colours. Looking at my microwave from across the room the display always looks very fuzzy.
My cpap (a machine that helps you breathe when you sleep) has the lumen output of the sun. I literally have duct tape and cardboard over the display and light still leaks out. So I also put a towel over that.
@@Hyraethian That's because blue lights are extremely short wavelength. I hate them.
@@Hyraethian I'm with you, it's the equivalent of someone scratching a fork on a plate.
red is the least dazzling, but blue is the nicest to look at.. I just want DIM blue lights, not piercing ones.
“Quicklier”
“Simulated wood-grain excellence”
Must be Americanish English ;)
I was looking for this comment. Quicklier?!?
"Quicklier" is my second-favorite comparative adverbjective. My favorite adverbjective is "Easilier."
Wordreference . Com says it's not a Word. Every other website says "it is but isn't".
I had a friend with an expensive Schimmel piano. The room where it was kept had a humidifier and a dehumidifier. That humidifier was a console with a large, slowly spinning, perforated disk. It had one side basically summerged and rotated as a fan blew on it. It reminded me of a small-holed of an old-fashioned bubble blowing machine.
It seemed to work very quickly.
A thought on your high-wick proposal: what about a wick that rests in a floating rack on rails? If the floats were calibrated right (something that could be adjusted by putting them on arms that could be moved) it'd keep a consistent amount of the wick below the waterline across most water-level ranges. The rails would keep it in the right horizontal position.
I have a Kenmore console humidifier from the 1990s that does just that. The floats are just hollow air-filled plastic, and they have grooves that fit in a couple of plastic flanges on the side of the tub. There's two fans and two pads per fan, for a total of four pads roughly 10" x 10" x 2". The pads go in box-like assemblies on top of the float, and those assemblies have round sleeves above that also sleeve over a shaft dropping below each fan. Here's an exploded diagram: www.appliancefactoryparts.com/humidifiers/kenmore/758-144521.html The float is #32. Oddly it shows jugs as a part as well, but while I can see in mine that there's tabs cast into the bottom of the tub to accept jugs and open the little spring-loaded valve at the bottom, I have the splash guard #45 for regular filling with a bucket, which I don't think can be there if jugs were used. Also why would you even need the float if you have jugs that maintain a constant water level in the tub? Maybe the jugs were optional.
VINDICATION
Thats what i thought as well. Seems like one of those simple methods :)
24:15
One simple solution could be a floating wick assembly. This way the wick would always be on top of the water, and that would not require a pump either.
That's a good idea, maybe having the entire assembly on floating 'rails' connected to the sides of the tank, keeping the fan at a constant effective rate as well
Edit: now that i re-read your comment it has hit me that was probably what you were saying, apologies about that
I was thinking of something similar to this like have it slightly in the water and then boom you got a 20 gallon humidifier
I scrolled to find this comment!
You could likely just add poly foam or cut up pool noodle to make that wick, glue some thin strips along the inside of the bucket to trap the wick in a channel if it tries to wiggle around
"even quicklier" my new favorite phrase!
I am VERY sensitive to mold and bacterial growth and I've always been frustrated at how easily most humidifiers seem to grow mold especially if you live in an apartment (where cleanliness isn't always up to you if you have dirty neighbors next door sharing an air vent). I LOVE the idea of a towel rack humidifier. I found a small plastic dish rack that folds out accordion style and I plan to find a way to make it stand on its side (probably with pvc pipes over the feet) to hang over a bowl. THIS WILL BE A GAME CHANGER for me. My sinuses will get so dry in winter that I get nose bleeds. I am looking forward to a nose bleed free winter!
Also your rant on blue LED displays for humidifiers is 100% valid and warranted. I cannot sleep with lose damn lights constantly glowing!!
I'm a guitar maker/restorer in Las Vegas AKA the freaking desert. We moved here about 2 years ago and the climate presented challenges, mainly how to maintain about 40% RH in the desert that stays about
I live in Vegas and keep my apartment humid with a two bucket swamp cooler that I built originally for burning man. It has a pump on the bottom and flows water from bottom to top over cooling pads. My whole apartment can stay at +55% and it doesn't even run all the time. If I run it constantly it goes through about 5 gallons of water in less than 24 hours.
Just check the specs before you buy a humidifier. There are also online calculators that give you the evaporation rate you will need. I have a relatively cheap and small ultrasonic humidifier with 450ml/h evaporation rate. It's enough to sustain about 50% RH with 40 cubic meters per hour ventilation in cold winter (5% RH of heated incoming air). There are more powerful units and I've even seen one for sale with a water pipe connection, although, it was quadruple the price.
I build and repair guitars, and I became concerned with issues with humidity because it can damage a guitar. so I purchased a humidity gauge and I keep an eye on it. like right now it's at thirty one percent. it also tells the high and low that twenty four period and the temperature and the high and low for it. that was a damm good investment. where I live the humidity is fairly decent but I have seen time's when it's gotten as low as seventeen percent. and up to almost fifty percent so I keep an eye on that gauge. and every once in while I'll have take steps to protect the guitars. and where I live the winter it can be brutal. and really cold temperatures can also damage a guitar. it's like they say a person shouldn't ship guitars in cold temperatures. like especially Gibson guitars with nitro cellulose lacquer finishes it can cause severe finish checking. so I have to say that humidity gauge has been a huge help and a life saver for the guitars no doubt.
His focus on energy usage is misplaced. It's going to take about 2260 kilo joules of energy to convert a kilogram of water into vapor. That energy can come from electricity supplied to the humidifier, or it can come from the air. But that energy has to be supplied regardless. And if the energy comes from the air, then it may be too cool for comfort and your heating system turns on to replace the energy used to evaporate the water used to increase the humidity.
So high efficiency humidifier simply means the heating system works more to warm the air back up. Low efficiency means heating system works less. Net result is total energy used is approximately the same.
@@johncochran8497, I think he talked about it and, correctly, said that it's highly likely that your heating system is more efficient than plain resistive electric heating.
Really appreciate you adding the centigrade temperature after saying the Fahrenheit.
You should use Kelvin, and point out that it's *proper* "metric" (SI) units.
Or, follow the recent XKCD cartoon about the thermometer settings having everything except Fahrenheit, getting crazier and crazier with each menu option.
Yas!
@@JohnDlugosz Not here to discuss which one is best. Just happy that I don't have to do any math. :P
Hey Alec! I'm also passionate about humidifiers, and I have a few things to add. Lasko, and previously Hamilton Bay makes a wick humidifier that pumps water up on top of the wick. This is done by an impeller on a shaft connected to the fan, so there aren't significantly more parts to fail, and had several advantages. First, the water flow makes it so you don't need the bacteriostat. They specifically instruct you not to use it. Second, with non circulating humidifiers, after a few weeks, you'll notice minerals have accumulated over the wick, so it stops wicking. Not a problem for the circulating wicking humidifiers. There isn't a waterfall sound, as you suspected there would be, because the wick material breaks the surface tension, water flows silently. There is only fan sound. Another approach I really like is to use PLANTS. Plants require watering daily, and they evaporate that water. Pothos is a good one because it will evaporate as much water as you give it, and when you slow down it will slow down without dying. Fill your house with plants, water them how much you need to be comfortable. Be prepared to shove them into storage outdoors in the summer.
What models are you referring to?
@@trash.picker The one I have at home right now is Lasko EC09150
I bought a version of the console humidifier like yours. My rh was 16%!!! I’ve had this humidifier running on high speed for a few hours and already has the first floor up to 40%. I imagine all of the wood work and floors, piano, and guitars will soak up the moisture, so I set it to 55%. After a week or so I’ll set it to 45%. Thank you!
"even more quicklier"
I have a feeling we'd get along great in person
I'm behind by 2 months, but oh well. I had to stop the video because I couldn't hear it over my own laughter when he said that.
I showed my mom this channel the other day when I came over and the first thing she asked me after we watched a video was "Does he have a video on fax machines? I always wondered how they worked..."
Accuracy of basic hygrometers: I had two cheap, basic hygrometers and a fancy top range from Silva. The cheap one allways agreed, and they also agreed with the one on my humidifier. The high-quality expensive Silva was always off. And in the long run it seemed wrong. I brought the cheap one and the Silva to a professional installator of outdoor scientific meterological instruments, and they tested them for me in a test chamber: The cheap ones were surprisingly good. The Sylva was just crap.
I sent the Sylva back to Sweden with a complaint. And I got a new one back that just the same sort of crap.
Wait is it Sylva or Silva
i love how you take the most uninteresting of topics and make them fascinating. who wouldve thought a 30 minute video about humidifiers would be this interesting.
Those brown box console humidifiers have been available for decades. In the 1960's my dad bought one about the same size. There was a rectangular water basin in the bottom(no bottles) , and a fan in the back, it had a cloth type material like a towel but not as dense that hang inside on a rack and dipped into the water. The fan blew air thru the material and up through the top. It worked really well. Later I had one essentially similar but instead of the cloth it had a big water wheel with foam stretched around the diameter which picked up water as it turned and the fan on the back blew through that. Now you can't find either of those in stores mainly because they didn't need those costly replacement " paper wicks". With the old style from years ago, once you bought the machine that was it , other than the demineralizing chemical.
Instead of the soap dispenser, you could use a bettix bottle to accurately measure your dosage each time. These are commonly used by brewers and aquarium owners.
Many people may have seen a similar concept to these with mouthwash bottles marketed for kids. You squeeze the bottle and liquid flows up to where it can be measured. This can then be dispensed by pouring out.
I’d never heard of this (long time fish owner) I just use syringes for my fish measuring needs, I’m def gonna check these out
The bright LEDs are my bane, I have masking tape over every source I can manage in my living space.
Lol. I thought l had to be the only sane person to do that! Being that you're clearly of a kindred spirit I'll even share my "generation 2.o version" of our masking tape hack.
Instead of JUST tape, I've started adding the little colored paper adhesive sticker labels that are for pricing your stuff at yard sales. You can experiment with different combinations of colored stickers to balance out what is usually a horrible color in LED bulbs.
A little masking tape, a couple of red stickers, a yellow and an orange one here and there.... And voila! I've actually got a pleasantly warm LED light.
FoulOwl ive taken stuff apart and crushed the bulbs
I bought a roll of 5% window tint and put that over them. Some sources I put 2 layers on.
My computer case has a bright white LED behind the power switch that is only on when the computer is on. The case also has a tempered glass panel on the side and vents in the front and back that you can see through.
So let that sink in.
Apparently, that bright LED is the only way I could ever possibly tell that my computer is on. Certainly not the fact that I can literally see the fan running and the other lights inside the case come on. I’ve had that power light long since covered with a piece of electrical tape, as I’ll usually leave my computer running overnight to render/upload stuff.
@@spartan117zm There is a couple power indicators inside the case of mine. on the motherboard. at least I was able to turn off the RGB lights in bios for when the machine is powered down but plugged in.
Got into the humidifier game last year and ended up getting a SmartMi. It's a 4L "smart" model. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't even use wicks. Instead there's a few dozens textured solid plastic discs rotating in the reservoir. The discs pull the water in front of the fan which proceeds to evaporate it. Power consumption is great too: about 8W over 12h to go through the reservoir, or roughly 91Wh/gallon. Very quiet too. The reservoir is one large, square bucket with little to no crannies and nooks, so it is very easy to clean, and the discs can be simply popped into the dishwasher (or hand scrubbed). I also really like the minimal aesthetics of the product. Venta makes similar products, although some of their models have filters and "hygiene discs" that need frequent replacing, and Desert Spring manufactures a Furnace Humidifier, also disc-based and meant to be attached to central HVAC.
Floating wick! Make it to the wick container floats on the water with a little bit of its bottom submerged, and slowly sinks down as the water is depleted.
That way you can have much greater tank capacity while maintaining maximum wick surface area
Can we just appreciate this man’s hair, it’s always well groomed
Its gotten way better recently, and I think it's because he doesn't get it cut so short(cuz of the pandemic he maybe doesnt go to the barber shop), longer hair really suits him better.
@@sebastiangorka200 Dude it's like night and day, I hope he keeps it long.
"That's why they call it John!" I had to pause there cause I was dying at that joke.
just don't kill its dog or it's gonna kill your entire neighbourhood
OH MY GOD!!! that joke went miles over my head XD. so glad i saw your comment lol
this has been said a million times before but, i love how informative and concise these videos are, all the while taking into account alternatives and other options to what you're discussing. i live in miami, florida- i literally couldnt physically have more moisture in my air. and yet, my first thought when watching this was, "wow, id love to try that homemade humidifier idea," before quickly realizing that i'd end up killing myself via heat exhaustion if i tried that here. tips for the mainly discussed product, cheaper alternatives AND considerations for their quirks, all alongside mentioning economic options AND under 30 minutes. this channel is absolutely golden
"To my fellow Midwesterners, Menards..."
Hey, he really is one of us!
He knew exactly where he was going with that before he said it. 😂
Ope™
I lived in the Midwest my whole life, or up until a couple years ago, and we NEVER had a Menards. My grandma's town had one, so I knew of Menards, but we didn't have one within 100 miles. I recently went to visit my parents, now they have 2, 2!
@@keiffitz689 Spotted the Minnesotan / Wisconsinite!
I'm surprised that they opened up locations in my state, West Virginia.
5:25 - It can also dry out your nasal passages and lead to nosebleeds. Ask me how I know. 😒
Ugh, I know this all too well. Nose be looking like Mt Vesuvius during the winter.
Of course the Vicks product is an electrode boiler! You’re just too young to remember the ones we had in our houses in the 60s. The tank was basically a clear jar and the electrodes sat down directly in the water. You cleaned them every week or so with a screwdriver. When it was not plugged in, of course.
Yeah, I used one of these when I was sick with whooping cough and the dry air was making it worse. You could, with enough salt, get it to go through the entire tank in just an hour or less, and it got my room so humid that it was condensing on the windows. Plus, boiling has the added advantage of ensuring the mist is nice and clean and sterile, unlike the high frequency vaporiser type. And since those seemed to be the only two models available in stores around here, it was the obvious choice.
I grew up in the 2000s and we had one of those too from when my Dad was a kid. Probably the best thing to use when you have a nasty cold. (Vicks on the chest, and the humidifier with vicks on it)
The sparks from the shorted electrodes helps blast off more crud, cleaning them with it running is more efficient.
*This is satire, please don't do this*
I used to leave mine plugged in and I would stick my dink in
Getting zapped with static electricity and reducing damage to electronics is reason enough to have a humidifier for me. Thanks for the content. Really enjoy your videos.
"The Matrix" "The wick" were these made by Keanu Reeves?
No, but he plays a starring role in them.
@@PassiveDestroyer I was talking about the parts of the humidifiers dude, wtf
@@MEXICAN673 woosh
24:30 . An improvement to your idea instead of a pump . Have the wick sit on a vertical rails and add floats to both side of the wick at the desired height for peak efficiency
"Man's greatest enemy is not the devil nor even man, himself, but those darn blue LEDs in home humidifiers"
-Kierkegaard (probably)
At least it's not as bad as it used to be, when blue LEDs first hit the market manufacturers would put them in everything, often it wasn't an indicator or anything it was just a random bright blue light just for the sake of having a random bright blue light
@@RailBuffRob so basically every one if my arduino projects?
hehe blue light shiny....
I had a guitar pedal with a blue LED that did illuminate my face on stage very brightly
@@RailBuffRob I was in Europe in a nice hotel.... the stupid internet TV box... Superbright white LED was ON when in standby. It would turn OFF when the unit was on. 25,000 MCD 10 degree dispersion ice white LED to light up the room at night.
In a previous job we often tested (TV) set-top boxes. One of them we were working on for a while had a tiny surface-mount blue LED. It was so bright that we'd tape over it so we didn't get after-images looking anywhere near it.
Between the common super bright LEDs and the common LEDs that are *on* when the unit is *off* and vice-versa - who came up with that anyway?
also, I read an article a week or so ago that said: new research might show that dry, cold air negatively impacts the native microbe flora in our noses, making it easier for pathogens to get into our bodies and make us ill. I didn't read the study myself but this would definitely make sense to me! Yay humidifiers
I have an amazing air humidifier too. It's called a laundry rack, and it saves energy on both drying the laundry and humidifying the air! Neat!
13:46 - Thank you. Knowing someone else hates this as much as I do was extremely cathartic. If I had wanted a night light, I'd have just bought a night light. Instead I have to buy dimming and blackout sheets so the other products I buy aren't also night lights.
The burning question is were those replacement wicks priced dramatically lower than they might have been elsewhere? In other words, did you save big money at Menards?
I find value at Farm & Fleet
Who read that with the jingle!?! Dang effective marketing.
@@ericelsberry5585 You think you're saving, but you're getting screwed. Read with the jingle.
@@lotharbeck71 my Farm & Fleet became a Tractor Supply 15+ years ago. Had no idea they were even still around.
@@ericelsberry5585 Only those of us in the midwest.
I did the “wet towel” budget humidifier once when I didn’t have access to a real one - it worked like a charm! Though it required hanging three damp bath towels in a small room…definitely a “cheapskate college kid” solution, but it’s vindicating to see the same thing recommended here!
The fight against blue LEDs is more of an uphill battle than you think - these things are so popular, they won their own Nobel prize in physics.
It annoys the piss out of me. And it's not even particularly the fact that every appliance manafacturer uses blue leds, but the fact that they're always overly bright and not diffused at all. Some of them are even straight light beams for god's sake... What happened to the days that electronic manafacturers just put normal, nicely diffused led's that just emit enough light to be seen when looked at and not light up any objects in the dark? They're purpose is serve as status indicators for a product, not to be meant for some kind of light show for christ's sake...
@@Aomicplane It's not for lack of complaint, that's for sure. People have been complaining about overly bright blue light indicators on electronics for quite literally the entire 21st century.
@@z-beeblebrox Blue LEDs are usually the worst offenders, but these days they even use other color LEDs that can be as offensively bright. I recently got a coffee machine as a gift, which has both a green LED and red LED. These LEDs are of the SMD kind and are covered by a transparent piece of plastic with 0 diffusing. These literally light the whole kitchen and even part of the living room when the lights are out. Seriously how hard is it for manafacturers to spend like 1 or 2 dollars more on either decent diffusing, a LED which is by itself already diffused (these are actually purposely made to be used as status lights) or if they really want to be cost-saving just a proper resistor?
@@Aomicplane Cost efficient circuit design is actually why they are using such strong SMD LEDs. If they used a weaker LED they would need much more robust AC to DC circuitry, especially in the case of a mains device that does not require a lot of DC power (sub 200ma). Cheap buck transformers tend to flicker LEDs at very low currents, even more so on 7 Segment displays (due to the variability of current draw depending on the lit segments).
The solution to the induced common ground noise/spurious conduction is simple, yet costly on an economy of scale. You'd have to add at least a few resistors and relays, and then, most importantly, deal with the heat generated. This also would involve additional lot testing, different enclosure and PCB specs. Hence, just make that LED "soak" all the current it can to lessen the possibility of flicker, generated heat, and use less components in the process.
@@patricktrudeau1996 - I'm not buying any of that difficulty of design. I believe the super bright LEDs are used because the stuff is coming from China and there is no feedback from consumer to manufacturer.
Here in New England, we try to hang laundry as much as we can. During the warmer months, that means a clothesline outside.
In the winter, we use folding wooden racks. Typically they are in the bedrooms, but when we do a significant amount of laundry you'll see them in the other rooms too. Not the best for when company is over, but effective.
Not only does this nearly eliminate the use of the clothes dryer (still used in warmer months when it's wet out, but only when really needed) but, it has the added benefit of keeping the home's humidity at a comfortable level. Typically we have about a load a day for the 4 people in the house with sheets and towels included.
Not only do we save money not running the dryer, but we also save money in adding humidity. Oh, and we do have a whole house unit built into the forced hot air, but due to all the "ick" that forms, we only used it for one winter back in 1999.
I just dump the exhaust from the electric dryer inside during heating season. Humidifies and heats the interior space.
A LOAD A DAY ?!?!?!? Are you all playing Rugby daily or what ? No wonder why the energy consumption in this country is so high.
@@alexandreazzalini-machecle4775 I have 2 boys who are in competitive baseball leagues that have year round workouts, active in Boy Scouts, and tend to be outside. As a result, you can have baseball clothes, scout clothes, and school clothes all on the same day. That kind of laundry generation can add up quickly. Add to that at least 2 loads of sheets every week and a load of bath and kitchen towels and getting an average of a load a day isn't too hard.
good god, my cat nearly turned to a raisin in the winter of '99
@@christophersiano969 No offence but your towels and sheets might smell less badly and need washing less frequently if your home wasn't so moist or if your children washed after sports. Just saying. Or maybe it's the chemical high from the laundry products that you crave. Is there some sort of spray-on fabric conditioner you could use instead? (Use a chemical propellant instead of a mechanical atomiser and you get some lovely halogenated hydrocarbons to replace those lovely VOCs from the detergents and doubtless also billowing out from all your reconstituted wood furniture in your no doubt overheated home.)
My home made humidifier: Leave the bathroom door open and take a hot shower.
so you're telling me that you don't get scared of someone barging in?
Long hot shower, a fan blowing hallway air in (and humid air out) ... but it's chilly pulling that curtain back! I also got a pair of ultrasonic humidifiers and keeping them going at like 80% duty cycle is just enough for when it gets down to 20°F (~-5°C). What I don't like is that it cools, just like a swamp cooler, using room heat to supply the latent heat of evaporation.
Hanging clothes inside after washing also does a good job.
Don't even have to leave the door open. All of the accumulated humidity will be pushed into the rest of the house/apt in a couple of cycles (forced-air heating required). Slower if radiative heat due to natural convection. Bathroom power exhaust events, negate this in summer.
I'm an oddball, and actually run my bathroom vent most months during winter, nearly 24/7. Mitigates condensation/frosting (prevents rotting) of my window frames. (my RH is always under 30% in winter, I monitor it) And no, my mo. gas bill is still in the double digits in the northern midwest in jan/feb, & I'm blessed without itchy skin.
My home made heater: open the oven and set it to 350.
If you haven’t already explored (in the past 3 years since this video came out) the Venta LW45 Comfort Plus humidifier, it’s a huge step up from the Aircare evaporative design, especially for large space humidification. It’s an even MORE simple design, where instead of a replaceable wick, it uses a densely stacked rotating disk turning in the water basin to draw liquid water into the air current. This has pretty nice implications for sanitation since you can toss 90% of the assembly into a dishwasher for deep cleaning, along with the niceties of never having to buy paper wicks that eventually expire into a landfill. I tested the humidification efficacy and it exceeds the performance of the Aircare, as well.