Paper Clay Air Humidifier(maximelouis.com) |
Paper Clay Air Humidifier(maximelouis.com) |
Humidifying only 600 square feet, the size of a studio apartment, takes about 5 gallons of water per day in winter. [1]
The reservoir on this object looks to be no more than two gallons, and I would be truly shocked if it requires even daily refilling. If it actually moved enough water to make a difference, it would be a fundamentally flawed design in requiring multiple complete fillings per day, carting entire gallons to it (as you can't simply take the reservoir to the faucet). In fact however, I would be shocked if it made any measurable difference at all.
It speaks volumes that no information about the rate of water consumption and no measurement figures of RH are present on the page.
1: https://www.generalfilters.com/support/humidity-calculator.h... (settings: St Louis MO values for outside temperature and humidity. Inside 74, 50%, 8' ceilings, standard 0.5 air changes, 1 fireplace)
Maybe most people already know this, but I only learned it recently: you can go (approximately) from sqft to sqm by dividing by 10, presumably because 1m = 3.28ft and 3.28 squared is ~10. So 600sqft is about 60sqm (55.7)
Still approximate
If you want to really humidify a room it takes a big industrial sized unit. They had them in the rooms in our Colorado Airbnb cabin and they were totally necessary in the dry mountain air if you didn’t want to wake up in pain from dried out mucus membranes. Very loud and used many gallons of water in a single night.
This heavily depends on the ventilation as well. With ERV HVAC[1] it is much easier to keep higher humidity level as some of the moisture is reintroduced in the heat exchanger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_recovery_ventilation
I share skepticism about this being used in any serious way. An ultrasonic humidifier is going to be smaller, probably cheaper, and run laps around it in terms of output.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that makes low-cost air pollution sensors.
And with the point being power-free, the air is going to be static or nearly so around the object (or bathtub). If it's supposed to get a boost from moving air from a forced-air furnace, that's cheating -- because in that case you could just install a similarly passive flow-through humidifier on that same furnace and be done with it, save perhaps an annual pad change. Many use no power, just the same "capillary and evaporation" as this - except with actual calculations underlying their specifications.
Based on your numbers, 1 gallon would be enough for a 10m² bedroom.
Shouldn't even be on Hackernews
For Firefox no extension is needed on desktop. Google how to do it. For Android Firefox, I use the add-on called LEGIBILITY.
That's a terrible thing to do to people who have poor or low vision, and the font size is small enough that it's almost a problem for people who have otherwise decent vision but require reading glasses!
I cranked mine up too much and it caused a mold issue in my home, and mold in my home caused me health issues.
We have this whole house humidifier installed in our furnace: https://www.aprilaire.com/whole-house-products/humidifier/mo... It has a remote temperature sensor you install outside, then it automatically adjusts the humidity based on the outside temperature to keep it under the mold-growing level.
We’re sort of in a bind — so how are we supposed to have safe air? 6-hourly bleached, heater based humidifiers running off the tap?
Nothing's going to incubate in that.
a) tuning down the room temperatures to ~21°C in winter
b) drink a lot of water
The last time I got really, really sick was in 2017.
With ultrasonic or warm mist (steam) humidifiers you can over-humidify the air.
Cool right? Feel free to use this idea as prior art.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=venta+air+washer&iax=images&ia=ima...
But is it actually effective for humidification? The top comment mentions that it takes 5 gallons per day to humidify a small studio apartment under ideal conditions...
For a single room, if that towel holds a gallon it should work fine for an overnight humidification job.
You can still buy smaller versions of, they are called 'evaporative humidifiers' and use a paper element with a fan. They are slower to adjust humidity but leave zero haze.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
Also, as another poster pointed out, humidifying a large room in winter requires several liters of water per day. The cost of distilled water would quickly dwarf the cost of the humidifier itself, so other types of humidifiers besides ultrasonic (namely evaporative ones, where the main danger is mold, which distilled water doesn't help you with) are more economical.
We've mostly stopped using the humidifier now, because I can't find a source of distilled water that doesn't involve buying plastic bottles.
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I grabbed an evaporative one from the local big box hardware store and zero 'smoke'. You should get some bacteriostat and you'll have to replace the paper elements every now and again, but it's way better.
I live in an area with very hard water (around 300ppm), and the evaporated minerals are very visible in the air (and it leaves a white residue on the surrounding area).
Moved to an evaporative humidifier, my air quality appliances now operate in peace.
Tangential, but being curious how hard that was relative to mine led me to discover that Thames Water (i.e. only useful to anyone reading in London) has a pretty good page at [0] - a summary on the site itself but the PDF is really worth a look, lots of numbers. Maybe it's a regulatory requirement, but I wouldn't have expected it to be so easy to get so much information from them about my specific (it serves many districts in and around London with different sources and equipment) water supply.
[0]: https://www.thameswater.co.uk/help-and-advice/water-quality/...
Not here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_water_companies
(E.g. Canada Pension Plan, Morgan Stanley, Hong Kong based investment trust)
As I said, it may be a regulatory (Ofwat) requirement, but it isn't just a public body doing right by its citizens.
Interesting anyway, not that much of it means anything to me. Though apparently if/when I try brewing beer again I should add some magnesium. (It even lists the range that's helpful as a yeast nutrient, and above which contributes unwanted taste.)
