Room Humidifiers - Pros and Cons

Cool Mist Humdifiers

Humidification becomes a big issue in the wintertime. With the constant running of forced air furnaces and portable heaters, indoor air becomes extremely dry. And with dry air comes dry skin, dry mouth, difficulty breathing, and, often, a poor night's rest. Many furnaces come with humidifiers built into the heating system. Over time, these add on humidifiers fail and need to be replaced but usually at a significant cost; thus the popularity of room humidifiers. To the right, we have a typical cool mist humidifier. It works through a fan which moves air across an moist filter and then blows the humid air into the room. The really small ones tend to make quite a bit of noise and don't do a great job adding humidity to a room. Get one with a decent size fan, they actually run quieter and move more humid air into a room.

The cons - bacteria builds up in the holding tray water and the smell can be quite disagreeable. Cool mist humidifiers require a bit of maintenance and cleaning. It is recommended that you use some sort of bacteriostat to keep the bacteria breeding down. You also need to change the filter at least once a season. With the amount of time that these humidifiers run in the winter, they may last two or three seasons.

Warm Mist Humdifiers

Here's an example of a warm mist humidifier. This humidifier actually boils the water that you put into it. This works great for humidifying a room fairly quickly; however, with tap water comes a lot of minerals. As the water boils away in the humidifier, what's left behind are the minerals which build up as scale on the heating element. Scale decreases the effectiveness of the heating element over time. You could use a product that removes scale to clean the heating element or you could try distilled water instead of tap water as the water supply. I got 2 seasons out of this type of humidifier.

Warm mist humidifiers do not use filters and they do not need bacteriostat as they are boiling the water. They probably use more electricity to run but generally do a better job at humidifying.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

Here's the holding tray on my cool mist humidifer after a lot of use this winter. As you can see it is pretty disgusting. When you replace the filter on your humidifier, it's a good idea to clean out the tray and filter holder at the very least. I started with some ordinary dish soap but had to upgrade to Soft Scrub with bleach cleanser to deal with this mess. This is the scale and bacteria growth on the inside of the tray. The Soft Scrub with Bleach was a good idea to help kill some of this stuff as well.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

Okay, with a little elbow grease, we are back in business. You may want to throw away the sponge or dish cloth you used for this job or, at least, zap the damp sponge in the microwave for about four minutes to kill whatever bacteria it absorbed.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

Here's the old filter unit. Once these filters reach the end of their lifespan, the humidifier becomes incredibly inefficient. As you can see, the filter unit is pretty disgusting and makes a good case for using bacteriostat on a regular basis.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

Here's the new filter. It's not specifically made for my humidifier but I just took some scissors to it and made it work.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

I've cleaned the filter unit and installed the new filter. I usually just stick the tray and filter unit in the dishwasher but didn't have a dishwasher handy here. Elbow grease works well.

Replacing filter in Cool Mist Humidifier

Reassembly of tray and filter unit as well as working humidifer.

Cats prefer clean and efficient humidifiers

Whitesox is already breathing easier after humidifier tear down and rebuild.