A company accused Wirecutter of being pay-for-play, based on how how heavily affiliate revenue (allegedly) factors into Wirecutter reviews. [1] The Wirecutter responded here. [2]
I wonder if this was part of the reason that the Honeywell unit was recommended.
As a German I and many others are religiously following what our consumer reports "Stiftung Warentest" recommends (except for high-tech products). Germans have very high confidence in the products and many companies print a good test result ("very good" or even "good" on their packaging). Reasons are that they are extremely thorough, unbiased, financially independent and can be quite tough. They have sophisticated testing facilities, do lab tests, test lifetime of products with machines, etc. And they have been sued several times by companies.
So when I cam to the US I was very worried of the basically unregulated companies to screw me over so naturally I (digitally) subscribed to the OG Consumer Reports (which historically seems to be the role model of all other international consumer reports). However I am so disappointed about the magazine:
- it is not very thorough or strict (rather leniant)
- it has a really poor selection of product categories
- besides a table of comparing the products features it has very little editorial buying guides that go more into detail.
In the case of the German magazine, when you read through some of the guides they can be quite entertaining, they slap the wrists of even the most powerful (german) companies if something breaks or if they falsely advertise features, or if there are critical design flaws in the product. I really wish CR would be as critical.
And the Wirecutter response even has a factually inaccurate statement in the first 3 sentences:
> In it, the company claims that The Wirecutter initially picked NextDesk as an editorial recommendation but later downgraded the recommendation after NextDesk declined to set up an affiliate-revenue agreement.
>We want to be clear: NextDesk’s claim is false, and its representation of our editorial decision-making process is factually inaccurate.
That claim as described is in fact TRUE. NextDesk was picked, then declined an affiliate-revenue agreement, then the recommendation was downgraded. That was the order of events. The rest I don't know, but it's pretty ridiculous to have that kind of error when these kinds of things often result in lawsuits.
I still use The Wirecutter, but in combination with other sources. I try to ask myself the question: do there appear to be competing products that wouldn't provide the affiliate revenue and therefore potentially be left out of the recommendations?
If I'm just deciding between a bunch of stuff on Amazon, then I assume there's no thumb on the scale.
I suspect you are right. I bought a wireless router they recommended once, and it was worse than the one it replaced. Since then I have not trusted any online review site.
I don't trust reviews on the internet at all anymore, unless they come from a single person (not a faceless group) that's known in that space. Affiliate garbage has ruined the ability to find any good information about products.
Friendly reminder: If this is not the internet you want, please try to support indie content producers whose work you think is decent and who take tips/Patreon/et al. And if you can afford it, subscribe to online newspapers and the like (because journalism is in a world of hurt and it is negatively impacting minor little things like freedom and democracy).
I blog and I take tips and Patreon and I sometimes hit the front page of HN. I make a pittance. This means that I have no real choice but to do other kinds of paid writing.
So I've thought long and hard about this and I've read the stuff on HN for years where people here don't want ads on the sites they visit, don't want paywalls, don't like content marketing and "pay for play" affiliate sites, etc etc etc.
And then also do not want to leave tips, support a person's Patreon, etc.
If you give writers and other creatives no means to earn an adequate income trying to meet your prissy high standards for so-called ethics [1], then don't be all shocked that they will do whatever happens to actually work to line their pockets, though it involves lying, writing reviews for pay without actually ever touching the product, etc.
People need to eat. Not everyone can be a programmer.
Make it possible for creatives to establish a middle class income. Stop telling people like me "Writing doesn't pay. You know that. Go get a real job." and find a way to make it pay such that doing the kind of writing you want to see is what gets rewarded and not sketchy garbage.
Writing does pay. It just pays for doing bad things and occasionally someone like J.K. Rowling gets stinking rich. It doesn't have to be that way. The world can decide it values good writing and that writers deserve a decent income and make choices to move the world in that direction.
[1] These so-called "ethics" seem to boil down to "we expect writers to write for free and find some other means to support themselves while producing quality content as...a hobby, I guess" -- aka slave labor. And then folks get upset if you frame it that way.
Actually just discovered that channel a couple weeks ago. Kind of amazing how interesting he can make such mundane topics. (Though I do prefer to watch at 1.75-2x speed.)
the TC video's conclusion is that the evaporative humidifiers are best, but TFA's main complaints would not be solved by that. It sounds like the TFA needs an air filter combined with an evaporative cooler. And maybe some expectation management concerning what happens to standing water at room temperature under a fan.
I have one of these; the complaint about the fan being inaccessible is legitimate, but it's otherwise clean, and easy to clean - the tank and the base can be scrubbed by hand or just thrown in the dishwasher, unlike any vaporizing humidifier I've used. I think the other complaints may be regional - and the fact that the proposed solutions all seem to be vaporizing humidifiers (or boiling water) seems telling.
I got one because in Arizona, the water quality's terrible, but the air is bone-dry to the point it turns your skin to sandpaper. The hard water means that vaporizing humidifiers fill the air with white dust that coats everything, because they vaporize the minerals. Evaporative humidifiers don't; the minerals all end up in the filter. And, while an evaporative humidifier has no trouble going through a full tank of water overnight on the lowest settings in AZ, it phsyically can't oversaturate the air like a sauna in the way that a vaporizing humidifier does.
The air in the north east just doesn't get dry enough (maybe in winter, but then you don't have the AC fighting your humidifier), and if boiling a pot of water is what the author's looking for, an evaporative humidifier just doesn't do that.
I have one too and cleaning the tank was never an issue. Instead, my problem was the wick always got moldy on me within a couple weeks. I went through a couple cycles of buying new wicks from them, but it kept happening and I gave up on it. Went back to my old ultrasonic one, which isn’t great, but it doesn’t get black mold and is better than nothing.
As someone living on the east coast and having a very sensitive nose, I have tried different humidifiers and sadly no humidifiers have been perfect. There are three main types of humidifiers:
1. Warm mist humidifiers boil water and generate steam which humidifies the air. But, they are a burn hazard and consume a lot of energy.
2. Cool mist (non ultrasonic) work like miniature swamp coolers. They are essentially fans which draw air through a wet paper wick. The Honeywell mentioned in the article is of this type. The fan is however very underpowered and it doesn’t work well in anything bigger than a small bedroom. Vornado makes a version with a much more powerful fan which works very well in large rooms, but their tanks are finicky and prone to breaking and leaking. The wick absorbs minerals in the water and will eventually have to be replaced.
3. Ultrasonic humidifiers: A vibrating diaphragm will aerosolize water. Unless you use distilled water, minerals in the water will turn into dust and reduce air quality.
I happen to like the non ultrasonic cool mist ones because they use less energy than the warm mist ones and replacing crusty wicks is cheaper than using distilled water in ultrasonic ones. The problem is everything currently on the market has issues. Any company making incremental improvements to existing cool mist humidifiers will probably get a lot of eager buyers.
Interesting. So one personal observation on Wirecutter (which caused me to stop trusting it).
It does reviews of portable air conditioners. A couple of years ago, it went into painstaking detail on how single hose AC is bad. They linked articles from the Department of Energy and so on. Their message was that single hose were easy to install but were absolutely not worth it. And recommended a dual hose system
I happen to agree with that. Portable AC units are already incredibly inefficient, so you don't want to make it any more inefficient than it has to be. I bought their recommendation, it was actually a decent one.
Next year, the completely backtracked. Not because new research came to light that contradicts the previous one. Not because new models came out that massively improved the losses (not even sure that's possible). No. Now they say that the difference is "minimal". It is not minimal, and their previous argument is that it wasn't minimal and they should only be used when there was no other option. They did not provide updated efficiency figures.
Here's the new text:
> While dual-hose models have been shown to outperform some single-hose units in extremely hot or muggy weather, the difference is usually minimal, and we don’t think it outweighs the convenience of a single hose.
Sure, one can reverse their position and that can be a healthy thing to do. But to take major pains in arguing one position one year, just to reverse the position and provide no new data, it's very fishy.
And, of course, the recommended models tend to be pricey too.
FWIW, you are correct that it is essentially physically impossible for the single hose models to be as efficient as dual hose. Single hose models take in conditioned air, pump heat into it, then pump that air to the exterior. Dual hose do the same, but with exterior air as the input.
Single hose models have to work harder two ways. First, in pumping the air out of the conditioned environment, they're basically throwing away work they've done. Not all of it, but some. More the bigger the difference is between the interior and exterior.
Another thing they have going against them is that they need to pull air from somewhere -- the exterior. So their fans have to work a bit harder due to the pressure difference.
Dual hose models suffer neither drawback. Single hose portable ACs are an abomination that should not exist.
How big is the difference then? I see EER ratings in a huge range, and if I trust those then getting the right model matters much much more than single vs. dual hose. Are those numbers not to be trusted?
Edit: I found some numbers, but they seem to support the 'minimal' theory. This page[1] says that SAAC ratings take the air infiltration into account, and that SAAC for a single hose model is 55-58% of a simpler rating, while a dual hose model is 63-70%. That's only about a 15% loss in efficiency. But the difference between a good model and a bad model with the same number of hoses can supposedly exceed 50%!
I own this model, and use it to humidify a small room. I sympathize with the author's complaints with respect to the difficulty of cleaning it, though mine just doesn't need cleaning very often. And the wick DOES get moldy if you let it sit in wet water for weeks on end.
But her other complaints puzzle me:
I don't find it to be messy to refill. What is she doing wrong?
It's even more baffling that she thinks it "doesn't work". I mean, she refills the tank every night, so we know the water is disappearing from the tank... where does she think the water is going? Isn't that proof enough that it does, in fact work?
A teaspoon- of bleach or so for 3 gallons of water will solve your mold issue quite handily, even while sitting. It's not enough to smell even when the humidifier is running at full blast. Just enough to kill bacteria and mold.
I'm repeating this advice a lot in this thread, it surprises me it's not better known.
I have this model, and I thought the refill comment was funny too. She's carrying it with the opening pointed down, cap screwed on, but the cap must be leaking. My cap doesn't leak, but I carry mine with the opening up.... so it doesn't matter if the cap leaks. I leave the reservoir open, sitting on my counter each morning so that it dries out, and i run the fan on the unit for a while to dry out the filter (so it doesn't mold). My unit doesn't get dirty, but I don't have dogs.
I just bought a (different) honeywell humidifier. so far it works, but not as well as I expected. I hoped it would be able to maintain a somewhat stable humidity for the sake of my guitars, but it can't really keep up with the desiccating power of my central heat. I wonder if part of the issue here is mismatched expectations with evaporative humidifiers?
>though mine just doesn't need cleaning very often.
Do you have carpet where you use it and do you have pets?
From fairly limited observation on computer fans, those two factors make a huge difference in how messy fans will get. Apartment with hardwood floors, air duster once a year is fine. Apartment with carpet, monthly minimum still leaves the fans gunked up.
Algicide also works. Benzalkonium chloride. You can get it as a 60% solution as a pool chemical and that will last forever. I use like 0.005% iirc. I make a 1% stock and dose that in, but I haven't used a humidifier in a while (prolly should)
I was confused by that complaint about it not working too. If the water disappearing isn't enough to confirm it then a hygrometer certainly would do the trick.
I have the same humidifier that the author does and I largely disagree with her points. It is rather ineffective at humidifying larger rooms (e.g. for the ~350 sq. ft. room I have it in, it humidifies the room +10% above what it otherwise would've been at aka 23% => 33% per my hygrometer), but it's certainly better than nothing. I usually have to refill the tank 3 times/day which is by definition a testament to how much it humidifies my apt's air.
However, I agree that the Wirecutter's recommendations are suspect sometimes; mostly for the more expensive items that cost several hundred dollars for a "quality" item [0]. However for the smaller/cheaper things where it's exceptionally hard to stand out in a crowded field of products (e.g. routers, bath towels, basic kitchen equipment, home tool kits, etc.), the Wirecutter is a good way to narrow down the choices.
Imo the wirecutter model doesn't make sense for monitors. The major manufacturers seem to release new models several times a year and there's too many dimensions to optimize for. I have different preferences for gaming vs development, a single monitor can't satisfy them both right now.
As an owner of the Z27, I can confidently say that for most people, a 27in 1440p monitor is a better choice over a 4K monitor in the same size. You'd likely need to increase the render scale on a 4K monitor at that size, resulting in a lower effective resolution.
After years of garbage humidifiers, I made my own.
It cost a tiny fraction of the high end models, has huge reservoir, easy to clean, easy to modify and repair.
It's a food grade 5 gallon bucket ($3) with a bathroom vent fan ($15) mounted to the lid with a pvc pipe section ($2 maybe) for adapting the fan the wick, a flour sack cloth towel (pack of 10 for $5). A couple of holes in the lid, some creative testing for holes in the cloth (made it a tube that is cut to the height of the bucket) and presto... industrial strength humidifier for about $25 with 3 gallon capacity.
I am never going to buy another commercial humidifier ever again. I will tweak this design until it's perfect.
Well, I thought about building my own, but it's not so easy as you make it seem to get one that is efficient (i.e., not just brute force capacity through size) and easy to use.
- How to make it not look like an animal food barrel in your living room, aka WAF, although I do find that term somewhat demeaning as I get older - I used to not care about such things either when I was in my 20's, but nowadays I do, even if it's just because of the realization that people around me care.
- How to make a mechnism to easily fill it, without spilling. This is related to size - you can have a huge one so that you only have to fill it every few days, but then you'll need to shlepp around buckets or watering cans. If it's smaller, you need a separate tank, which you now have to hook up to the rest.
- How to moisten the wick. It's called a 'wick' because it, well, wicks, of course, but you need a relatively large surface contact area to get lots of water into the wick(s); or you need a pump that will keep vertical 'wicks' wet all the time.
- The fans need to be on the top, and large for minimum noise, but the largest Noctuas are only 20cm. But you need air intake from the bottom, somehow, while still maximizing volume efficiency (i.e., you don't want 75% of the volume of the device to be unused because you can only have water in the lower 25% because of the airflow design).
- You need something that can be cleaned and filled without too much (preferably no) disassembly, and you don't want moving parts like floats or fragile things like measuring water level with metal strips because those will break within a year or two; or faster if you don't have a water softening device in you house.
Overall, I think humidification is a job of proper devices that are part of the indoor climate control system along with heating and cooling, but I don't know of residential systems that combine all, and if they do/would exist, it would be much more expensive than the few 100 at most people want to spend on this, and require extensive plumbing to get installed.
I felt like such an idiot when I paid $100 for one and found out it’s basically a bucket with a big wick and a $10 fan (retail!) controlled by a humidistat. There had to be a good $80 markup there
I use a "swamp cooler" as a whole house humidifier. It's the same concept. Also my cardboard wick doesn't get mold - unlike some other paper based wick humidifiers.
I have the steam humidifiers for the small rooms. But my winter has been so much comfortable since using the swamp cooler. I just turn it on a few times a day and within minutes, the humidity jumps a few percentage.
1. Warm Mist humidifiers work by boiling water. This has the downside of... well... boiling hot water hanging around the area. But otherwise, these are the simplest and are only ~$20 or $30.
2. Cool Mist humidifiers try to get around the boiling water issue. Since they humidify at room-temperatures, they're a lot more efficient... but now bacteria / mold is growing constantly. You can somewhat fix that with chemicals / filters / whatever, but now those filters need to be cleaned, or those chemicals need to be replaced on the regular.
In both circumstances: minerals in the water will harden into 'slag'. More so in warm-mist humidifiers actually (because boiling water separates water from minerals very naturally). Cool-mist humidifiers often carry the slag into the air, forming "white dust" all over your furniture.
The slag dissolves with vinegar in ~20 minutes or so (unless its been building up for a while). But its never an easy job to clean.
I prefer my warm-mist humidifier. Centralize the slag into one spot and clean it with vinegar every few weeks. Better than dusting off all my furniture in the room.
The best humidity solution I've found is to set my shower up as a humidifier. Puts out a lot of humidity that spreads throughout the house. Doesn't need any cleaning, refilling, etc. Total cost on Amazon, like $40 (probably cheaper from Home Depot). Picture of my setup: https://imgur.com/a/Oca4USg
I did that with 4-5 products: A shower head splitter, a shower->hose adapter, a mister, and anti-leak tape.
To everyone experiencing mold issues, there's an easy way to avoid it. Simply let the wick dry out between tank fillings.
I have eight of these Honeywells running in a couple of vacation rentals. I let guests know to run them till dry before refilling, and I make sure they don't sit wet between guests. I also run a large Holmes wick humidifier at my home. I've run the Honeywells for several years now, and the large Holmes for twelve years. In all that time, I've only had one episode of significant mold growth on a wick, which occurred when I accidentally allowed a wick to sit wet for several days on end.
If the wick stays wet for many days or weeks, it will mold. This is not a design flaw. It's unavoidable biology.
Also note that the UVC "disinfection" system in these Honeywells is useless. It might disinfect the tank water in transit to the wick, but that does nothing to address the innumerable bacteria and fungal spores supplied by the air passing through the wick. What the UVC lamp does do is slowly destroy the plastic base, so I always remove the UVC lamp when I buy one of these humidifiers.
I agree the fan should be more accessible, but it can easily be blown out with a computer duster or compressor.
I bought this (a few years ago) at Wirecutter's recommendation and had a bad experience with it as well. Like the medium post, the humidifier didn't work for me. Eventually, I got rid of it.
Wirecutter simply isn't that reliable. I do check their recommendations as one input source, but their top recommendation is not reliable (and will change from time to time).
To give another data point, this exact model--the Honeywell HCM-350--was reviewed by Consumer Reports[1] who rated it the 4th best model of 13 models in their large-room category for humidifiers. (The top three were Boneco 7135, Crane Germ Defense EE-8065, and Honeywell HWM-340.) This is what they said about the Honeywell HCM-350:
"With Excellent ratings for moisture output, convenience, and energy efficiency, this humidifier gets the job done. Excessive noise, often a problem with evaporative models because they use fans to moisten the air, shouldn’t be a major problem. One caution: Its performance using hard water is just average, so anyone with mineral-rich water can do better elsewhere. Plus, this model won’t shut off automatically when the tank is empty. Output 5/5,
Convenience 5/5, Noise 4/5, Efficiency 5/5, and Hard water 3/5."
So it seems like a good model among those available. But having used multiple different humidifiers over the years, I hated all of them for one reason or another, and returned or threw them out within days or weeks of purchase. I think that a good humidifier is an unsolved problem. It's probably the same for the author of the article.
[1] Consumer Reports is a decades-old non-profit organization which puts out a magazine (and website) which does unbiased product testing, has zero advertising, pays for all the products they test, never takes sample products, buys all their products anonymously (so they can't be given better samples for testing purposes), and has extensive laboratories, procedures, scientist/technicians for testing (a private track for testing cars, for example). I never heard of anyone claiming that Consumer Reports was fraudulent or pay-for-play.
Sat in a damp London flat, with condensation permanently dripping down the windows (despite the dehumidifier running virtually 24/7), I struggle to relate to a world where you would deliberately want to put moisture into the air.
A boiler humidifier has a nice random gurgle noise; that could be a plus for some. The water tank can be rather nasty and you know that the water vapor is safer because its steam.
Propane heat emits water vapor too; and if you can have a lot of plants around they add moisture and lots of other good and bad things to the air.
My issues are such that I can have happy plants and benefit from them. For about the power cost of a humidifier i can have an LED lit jungle shelf that transpires more than a gallon of water a day
Gotta say, I’ve had the Honeywell for a couple years and I’m quite happy with it. I haven’t had any of the problems that the article cites — it works well, easy to clean, easy to refill.
I’d be quite confused about whether article has the same product, except that the photos match my model.
> For me, today at least, it was a pot of boiling water on the stove.
If you elect to do this (I also did this, at one point in my life), think twice if your stove is gas. There's increasing evidence that gas stoves lower the air quality in your home, especially in apartments with poor ventilation:
Saying it doesn't work is misleading. If you need to fill it up every so often then it is working. By working I mean it is converting water into vapor, and that's all a humidifier can do. They can't magically make a desert climate humid. Most build-up in humidifiers is due to crappy water. They can't do a whole lot about that either. Yes, they should be easier to clean, but when they are that cheap, then yes, they are easier to just throw away. But you get what you pay for.
I'm pretty sure I had this exact model of humidifier at one point and had...none of these issues?
- I was able to pop the fan grille off for cleaning, it took me a while to figure out how, but once I did it was pretty easy.
- The wick does get crusty with mineral deposits, but I just soaked it in a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water (with a good subsequent rinsing), and it was almost as good as new.
- The rest was pretty easy to clean. As easy as any other humidifier I've owned, at any rate.
- I had it in a small bedroom (couldn't be more than 200 sq. ft), and it was perfectly humid in the room. Granted, it was a tiny room.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if this was part of the reason that the Honeywell unit was recommended.
1: https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/our-response-to-nextdesk/
[+] [-] ruph123|5 years ago|reply
- it is not very thorough or strict (rather leniant)
- it has a really poor selection of product categories
- besides a table of comparing the products features it has very little editorial buying guides that go more into detail.
In the case of the German magazine, when you read through some of the guides they can be quite entertaining, they slap the wrists of even the most powerful (german) companies if something breaks or if they falsely advertise features, or if there are critical design flaws in the product. I really wish CR would be as critical.
[+] [-] ErikVandeWater|5 years ago|reply
> In it, the company claims that The Wirecutter initially picked NextDesk as an editorial recommendation but later downgraded the recommendation after NextDesk declined to set up an affiliate-revenue agreement.
>We want to be clear: NextDesk’s claim is false, and its representation of our editorial decision-making process is factually inaccurate.
That claim as described is in fact TRUE. NextDesk was picked, then declined an affiliate-revenue agreement, then the recommendation was downgraded. That was the order of events. The rest I don't know, but it's pretty ridiculous to have that kind of error when these kinds of things often result in lawsuits.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141719
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729408
I still use The Wirecutter, but in combination with other sources. I try to ask myself the question: do there appear to be competing products that wouldn't provide the affiliate revenue and therefore potentially be left out of the recommendations?
If I'm just deciding between a bunch of stuff on Amazon, then I assume there's no thumb on the scale.
[+] [-] victor106|5 years ago|reply
I had the exact same issue with this humidifier. I got their upgraded version instead and that was better.
[+] [-] seanhope|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blackthorn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
I blog and I take tips and Patreon and I sometimes hit the front page of HN. I make a pittance. This means that I have no real choice but to do other kinds of paid writing.
So I've thought long and hard about this and I've read the stuff on HN for years where people here don't want ads on the sites they visit, don't want paywalls, don't like content marketing and "pay for play" affiliate sites, etc etc etc.
And then also do not want to leave tips, support a person's Patreon, etc.
If you give writers and other creatives no means to earn an adequate income trying to meet your prissy high standards for so-called ethics [1], then don't be all shocked that they will do whatever happens to actually work to line their pockets, though it involves lying, writing reviews for pay without actually ever touching the product, etc.
People need to eat. Not everyone can be a programmer.
Make it possible for creatives to establish a middle class income. Stop telling people like me "Writing doesn't pay. You know that. Go get a real job." and find a way to make it pay such that doing the kind of writing you want to see is what gets rewarded and not sketchy garbage.
Writing does pay. It just pays for doing bad things and occasionally someone like J.K. Rowling gets stinking rich. It doesn't have to be that way. The world can decide it values good writing and that writers deserve a decent income and make choices to move the world in that direction.
[1] These so-called "ethics" seem to boil down to "we expect writers to write for free and find some other means to support themselves while producing quality content as...a hobby, I guess" -- aka slave labor. And then folks get upset if you frame it that way.
[+] [-] jedimastert|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeehYYgl28
[+] [-] Ajedi32|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cl0ckt0wer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T-R|5 years ago|reply
I got one because in Arizona, the water quality's terrible, but the air is bone-dry to the point it turns your skin to sandpaper. The hard water means that vaporizing humidifiers fill the air with white dust that coats everything, because they vaporize the minerals. Evaporative humidifiers don't; the minerals all end up in the filter. And, while an evaporative humidifier has no trouble going through a full tank of water overnight on the lowest settings in AZ, it phsyically can't oversaturate the air like a sauna in the way that a vaporizing humidifier does.
The air in the north east just doesn't get dry enough (maybe in winter, but then you don't have the AC fighting your humidifier), and if boiling a pot of water is what the author's looking for, an evaporative humidifier just doesn't do that.
[+] [-] mtalantikite|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmebane|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superseeplus|5 years ago|reply
1. Warm mist humidifiers boil water and generate steam which humidifies the air. But, they are a burn hazard and consume a lot of energy.
2. Cool mist (non ultrasonic) work like miniature swamp coolers. They are essentially fans which draw air through a wet paper wick. The Honeywell mentioned in the article is of this type. The fan is however very underpowered and it doesn’t work well in anything bigger than a small bedroom. Vornado makes a version with a much more powerful fan which works very well in large rooms, but their tanks are finicky and prone to breaking and leaking. The wick absorbs minerals in the water and will eventually have to be replaced.
3. Ultrasonic humidifiers: A vibrating diaphragm will aerosolize water. Unless you use distilled water, minerals in the water will turn into dust and reduce air quality.
I happen to like the non ultrasonic cool mist ones because they use less energy than the warm mist ones and replacing crusty wicks is cheaper than using distilled water in ultrasonic ones. The problem is everything currently on the market has issues. Any company making incremental improvements to existing cool mist humidifiers will probably get a lot of eager buyers.
[+] [-] outworlder|5 years ago|reply
It does reviews of portable air conditioners. A couple of years ago, it went into painstaking detail on how single hose AC is bad. They linked articles from the Department of Energy and so on. Their message was that single hose were easy to install but were absolutely not worth it. And recommended a dual hose system
I happen to agree with that. Portable AC units are already incredibly inefficient, so you don't want to make it any more inefficient than it has to be. I bought their recommendation, it was actually a decent one.
Next year, the completely backtracked. Not because new research came to light that contradicts the previous one. Not because new models came out that massively improved the losses (not even sure that's possible). No. Now they say that the difference is "minimal". It is not minimal, and their previous argument is that it wasn't minimal and they should only be used when there was no other option. They did not provide updated efficiency figures.
Here's the new text:
> While dual-hose models have been shown to outperform some single-hose units in extremely hot or muggy weather, the difference is usually minimal, and we don’t think it outweighs the convenience of a single hose.
Sure, one can reverse their position and that can be a healthy thing to do. But to take major pains in arguing one position one year, just to reverse the position and provide no new data, it's very fishy.
And, of course, the recommended models tend to be pricey too.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|5 years ago|reply
Single hose models have to work harder two ways. First, in pumping the air out of the conditioned environment, they're basically throwing away work they've done. Not all of it, but some. More the bigger the difference is between the interior and exterior.
Another thing they have going against them is that they need to pull air from somewhere -- the exterior. So their fans have to work a bit harder due to the pressure difference.
Dual hose models suffer neither drawback. Single hose portable ACs are an abomination that should not exist.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I found some numbers, but they seem to support the 'minimal' theory. This page[1] says that SAAC ratings take the air infiltration into account, and that SAAC for a single hose model is 55-58% of a simpler rating, while a dual hose model is 63-70%. That's only about a 15% loss in efficiency. But the difference between a good model and a bad model with the same number of hoses can supposedly exceed 50%!
[1] https://www.pickhvac.com/portable-air-conditioner/best-dual-...
[+] [-] superbatfish|5 years ago|reply
But her other complaints puzzle me:
I don't find it to be messy to refill. What is she doing wrong?
It's even more baffling that she thinks it "doesn't work". I mean, she refills the tank every night, so we know the water is disappearing from the tank... where does she think the water is going? Isn't that proof enough that it does, in fact work?
[+] [-] falcolas|5 years ago|reply
I'm repeating this advice a lot in this thread, it surprises me it's not better known.
[+] [-] miek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetcrew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|5 years ago|reply
Do you have carpet where you use it and do you have pets?
From fairly limited observation on computer fans, those two factors make a huge difference in how messy fans will get. Apartment with hardwood floors, air duster once a year is fine. Apartment with carpet, monthly minimum still leaves the fans gunked up.
[+] [-] kortex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziml77|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindong|5 years ago|reply
However, I agree that the Wirecutter's recommendations are suspect sometimes; mostly for the more expensive items that cost several hundred dollars for a "quality" item [0]. However for the smaller/cheaper things where it's exceptionally hard to stand out in a crowded field of products (e.g. routers, bath towels, basic kitchen equipment, home tool kits, etc.), the Wirecutter is a good way to narrow down the choices.
[0]: e.g. they recommend a $370 (at the time of publication) 27", 1440p monitor; for that price the monitor should be 4K https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-27-inch-moni...
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstaley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|5 years ago|reply
It cost a tiny fraction of the high end models, has huge reservoir, easy to clean, easy to modify and repair.
It's a food grade 5 gallon bucket ($3) with a bathroom vent fan ($15) mounted to the lid with a pvc pipe section ($2 maybe) for adapting the fan the wick, a flour sack cloth towel (pack of 10 for $5). A couple of holes in the lid, some creative testing for holes in the cloth (made it a tube that is cut to the height of the bucket) and presto... industrial strength humidifier for about $25 with 3 gallon capacity.
I am never going to buy another commercial humidifier ever again. I will tweak this design until it's perfect.
[+] [-] roel_v|5 years ago|reply
- How to make it not look like an animal food barrel in your living room, aka WAF, although I do find that term somewhat demeaning as I get older - I used to not care about such things either when I was in my 20's, but nowadays I do, even if it's just because of the realization that people around me care.
- How to make a mechnism to easily fill it, without spilling. This is related to size - you can have a huge one so that you only have to fill it every few days, but then you'll need to shlepp around buckets or watering cans. If it's smaller, you need a separate tank, which you now have to hook up to the rest.
- How to moisten the wick. It's called a 'wick' because it, well, wicks, of course, but you need a relatively large surface contact area to get lots of water into the wick(s); or you need a pump that will keep vertical 'wicks' wet all the time.
- The fans need to be on the top, and large for minimum noise, but the largest Noctuas are only 20cm. But you need air intake from the bottom, somehow, while still maximizing volume efficiency (i.e., you don't want 75% of the volume of the device to be unused because you can only have water in the lower 25% because of the airflow design).
- You need something that can be cleaned and filled without too much (preferably no) disassembly, and you don't want moving parts like floats or fragile things like measuring water level with metal strips because those will break within a year or two; or faster if you don't have a water softening device in you house.
Overall, I think humidification is a job of proper devices that are part of the indoor climate control system along with heating and cooling, but I don't know of residential systems that combine all, and if they do/would exist, it would be much more expensive than the few 100 at most people want to spend on this, and require extensive plumbing to get installed.
[+] [-] kortilla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fma|5 years ago|reply
I have the steam humidifiers for the small rooms. But my winter has been so much comfortable since using the swamp cooler. I just turn it on a few times a day and within minutes, the humidity jumps a few percentage.
[+] [-] koolba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faeyanpiraat|5 years ago|reply
I've made my own aswell.
[+] [-] switchbak|5 years ago|reply
It's cheap, and very effective even for a larger space. I also have the humidifier the article mentions, and found it to be useless for a large area.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dragontamer|5 years ago|reply
1. Warm Mist humidifiers work by boiling water. This has the downside of... well... boiling hot water hanging around the area. But otherwise, these are the simplest and are only ~$20 or $30.
2. Cool Mist humidifiers try to get around the boiling water issue. Since they humidify at room-temperatures, they're a lot more efficient... but now bacteria / mold is growing constantly. You can somewhat fix that with chemicals / filters / whatever, but now those filters need to be cleaned, or those chemicals need to be replaced on the regular.
In both circumstances: minerals in the water will harden into 'slag'. More so in warm-mist humidifiers actually (because boiling water separates water from minerals very naturally). Cool-mist humidifiers often carry the slag into the air, forming "white dust" all over your furniture.
The slag dissolves with vinegar in ~20 minutes or so (unless its been building up for a while). But its never an easy job to clean.
I prefer my warm-mist humidifier. Centralize the slag into one spot and clean it with vinegar every few weeks. Better than dusting off all my furniture in the room.
[+] [-] tuna-piano|5 years ago|reply
I did that with 4-5 products: A shower head splitter, a shower->hose adapter, a mister, and anti-leak tape.
Splitter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0064TXLHA/
Adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GYV8G7S/
Elbow connector: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003BZD03K/
Mister (I used just the nozzle and discarded the hose) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004INGNPG/
Anti-leak tape: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003D7K8E0/
Alternatively tried this fogger nozzle which put out too much water and wet my bathroom floor, may work in some shower setups though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FNYNZZM/
[+] [-] eecc|5 years ago|reply
It blows ambient air directly onto the wetted disks; it will empty a full tank in a day and haven’t cursed anymore that usual while cleaning.
I did use a disinfectant additive
[+] [-] nate_meurer|5 years ago|reply
I have eight of these Honeywells running in a couple of vacation rentals. I let guests know to run them till dry before refilling, and I make sure they don't sit wet between guests. I also run a large Holmes wick humidifier at my home. I've run the Honeywells for several years now, and the large Holmes for twelve years. In all that time, I've only had one episode of significant mold growth on a wick, which occurred when I accidentally allowed a wick to sit wet for several days on end.
If the wick stays wet for many days or weeks, it will mold. This is not a design flaw. It's unavoidable biology.
Also note that the UVC "disinfection" system in these Honeywells is useless. It might disinfect the tank water in transit to the wick, but that does nothing to address the innumerable bacteria and fungal spores supplied by the air passing through the wick. What the UVC lamp does do is slowly destroy the plastic base, so I always remove the UVC lamp when I buy one of these humidifiers.
I agree the fan should be more accessible, but it can easily be blown out with a computer duster or compressor.
[+] [-] rexf|5 years ago|reply
Wirecutter simply isn't that reliable. I do check their recommendations as one input source, but their top recommendation is not reliable (and will change from time to time).
[+] [-] computator|5 years ago|reply
"With Excellent ratings for moisture output, convenience, and energy efficiency, this humidifier gets the job done. Excessive noise, often a problem with evaporative models because they use fans to moisten the air, shouldn’t be a major problem. One caution: Its performance using hard water is just average, so anyone with mineral-rich water can do better elsewhere. Plus, this model won’t shut off automatically when the tank is empty. Output 5/5, Convenience 5/5, Noise 4/5, Efficiency 5/5, and Hard water 3/5."
So it seems like a good model among those available. But having used multiple different humidifiers over the years, I hated all of them for one reason or another, and returned or threw them out within days or weeks of purchase. I think that a good humidifier is an unsolved problem. It's probably the same for the author of the article.
[1] Consumer Reports is a decades-old non-profit organization which puts out a magazine (and website) which does unbiased product testing, has zero advertising, pays for all the products they test, never takes sample products, buys all their products anonymously (so they can't be given better samples for testing purposes), and has extensive laboratories, procedures, scientist/technicians for testing (a private track for testing cars, for example). I never heard of anyone claiming that Consumer Reports was fraudulent or pay-for-play.
[+] [-] doublesocket|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|5 years ago|reply
Propane heat emits water vapor too; and if you can have a lot of plants around they add moisture and lots of other good and bad things to the air.
My issues are such that I can have happy plants and benefit from them. For about the power cost of a humidifier i can have an LED lit jungle shelf that transpires more than a gallon of water a day
[+] [-] lincolnq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadytrees|5 years ago|reply
If you elect to do this (I also did this, at one point in my life), think twice if your stove is gas. There's increasing evidence that gas stoves lower the air quality in your home, especially in apartments with poor ventilation:
https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/nitrogen-dioxides...
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/indoor-air-pollut...
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.122-a27
Instead, I recommend this humidifier, which is easy to clean (distilled water only, please) and refill (albeit on the smaller side):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WKZVWRD?psc=1
[+] [-] dumbfounder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allo37|5 years ago|reply
- I was able to pop the fan grille off for cleaning, it took me a while to figure out how, but once I did it was pretty easy.
- The wick does get crusty with mineral deposits, but I just soaked it in a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water (with a good subsequent rinsing), and it was almost as good as new.
- The rest was pretty easy to clean. As easy as any other humidifier I've owned, at any rate.
- I had it in a small bedroom (couldn't be more than 200 sq. ft), and it was perfectly humid in the room. Granted, it was a tiny room.