[JohnJamesRambo]

When I finally got a hygrometer I was amazed at how useless the powered one gallon air humidifiers are. They often can’t raise the humidity percent a single point with the hygrometer right by it in my rooms.

If you want to really humidify a room it takes a big industrial sized unit. They had them in the rooms in our Colorado Airbnb cabin and they were totally necessary in the dry mountain air if you didn’t want to wake up in pain from dried out mucus membranes. Very loud and used many gallons of water in a single night.

[cameldrv]

When I was a kid in the eighties we had these huge “console” humidifiers that held maybe 15 gallons and had a rotating belt and a big fan. Seems like they stopped making these in the nineties in favor of the useless tiny things.

[jcims]

My grandpa used to have the exact same thing.

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.

[exclusiv]

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

[IndrekR]

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

[jcims]

They ‘cheat’ a little by lofting liquid water which then evaporates. We have a water softener and the cool mist humidifier left a smoke-like particulate floating in the air (i think it was either salt from the softener or minerals from the water)

[mfkp]

Yes, that's the minerals in the water. Using distilled water prevents this.

[TeMPOraL]

I discovered this when doing a post-assembly indoor test of a Luftdaten air quality sensor I built[0]. I kept it running for few hours and then looked at the data, and saw some ridiculously high levels of PM2.5 and PM5 in the evening. I've decided to investigate it. Over the next two days, I figured out that the increased levels happen at times when our air humidifier is running, which led me to discover that those ultrasonic air humidifiers essentially atomize everything that was mixed with/dissolved in the water - and we were using filtered tap water with ours. With distilled water in the humidifier, the sensor did not show increased particulate levels.

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.

--

[0] - https://luftdaten.info/en/home-en/

[mfkp]

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

[oska]

Rain is essentially distilled water (evaporation from terrestrial water bodies and then condensation in the atmosphere). It picks up some contaminants in the atmosphere and some dissolved gases when it condenses but it's going to be mostly free of minerals (i.e. not be hard). So collecting rain water is one source of bulk 'distilled water'.

[im3w1l]

Boiling your water indoors will humidify the air.

[jcims]

We also have a air purifier that watches for particulate and they would battle each other constantly lol.

Moved to an evaporative humidifier, my air quality appliances now operate in peace.

[devtul]

Oooooh, so that is the cause of my apartment being hazy?! Just moved to a new place, air humidity can get around 10% and since I don't enjoy being tazed by my sofa I bought a small humidifier from Amazon, both I and my wife noticed what seems to be a cloud in our living room.

[jcims]

If it's a cool-mist type humidifier, definitely.

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.