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Paper Clay Air Humidifier
- onemoresoop 7y agoThis is a very good idea, it uses no external energy and can potentually last forever. It’s a very simple and efficient thing. The only thing that I wonder is if this could be washed and whether mold can form in the pores. My ultrasonic steam humidifier can be easily cleaned but it makes an audible sound that happens to not bother me.
- dugditches 7y agoWhat I was wondering too. Especially with the rough surface and slits in the back. Maybe putting a small amount of Bleach in the water would prevent it.
- pmoriarty 7y agoBe really careful with humidifiers. I cranked mine up too much and it caused a mold issue in my home, and mold in my home caused me health issues.
- bootlooped 7y agoI don't think it would be possible for a passive unit like this to do such a thing. With ultrasonic or warm mist (steam) humidifiers you can over-humidify the air.
- numpad0 7y agoOne one hand infection experts say humidity protects you, on the other hand they say most types of humidifiers are disease incubators. On top of it it’s a fact that humidifier additives effectively are chemical weapons that works on humans at lower concentrations than it works for pathogens. 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?
- Dylan16807 7y agoInstall a reverse osmosis system under your sink, and use that to fill the humidifier. Nothing's going to incubate in that.
- adrianN 7y agoHeat your homes a little less. There is a big humidity difference between an 18° room and a 24° room.
- MrGilbert 7y agoI was sick quite often in the past - what helped me was 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.
- exhilaration 7y agoThe rule of thumb is that if your humidifier is causing condensation on your windows, then you have condensation inside your walls as well, which is the necessary precursor for mold. We have this whole house humidifier installed in our furnace: https://www.aprilaire.com/whole-house-products/humidifier/model-400 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- everyone 7y agoIs this actually practical or is it some art project? It looks like the latter.
- tjmc 7y agoHVAC engineer here. Hard to tell as they don't provide any details on the rate of evaporation. One issue for ongoing use would be scale buildup - particularly in areas with hard water. Probably the best option would be to fill it with demineralized or RO water.
- tofof 7y agoThis is an art project and nothing more. 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.html 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)
- bootlooped 7y agoI think it would depend a lot on how much air is moving over it, and the temperature of that air. The surface area of it is pretty large (the whole thing is pretty ginormous also...). The reservoir size is an issue. 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.
- tofof 7y agoFor a similar surface area I think you could just fill your bathtub to an inch deep and wait for it to evaporate. You'll wait a long time, and your bathtub will get gross, just like this object will. 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.
- physicles 7y ago
- mrfusion 7y agoHere’s an idea I had for a humidifier. It simply tumbles thousands of tiny beads through tumbler with water at the bottom. Since the sheer number of small beads creates a huge surface area you’d get a bunch of evaporation. Cool right? Feel free to use this idea as prior art.
- bootlooped 7y agoThere is a similar concept where you have a stack of plastic discs half submerged in a water reservoir. The axis of the disc stack sits parallel with the surface of the water. The discs are rotated so their surface is always wet. Air is blown over them. This passively humidifies the air, and won't over-humidify since as the RH rises the amount of water that will passively evaporate goes down. These units are sometimes also called "air washers" since small particles can get stuck to the surface of the wet discs and come off in the reservoir. I've owned two, and can confirm they do pull stuff out of the air. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=venta+air+washer&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=venta+air+washer&iax=images&ia=ima... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/282057161748-0-1/s-l1000.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/282057161748-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
- aliswe 7y agoYes but energy intensive.
- fred_is_fred 7y agoCompletely unrelated the content - which I cannot read due to the tiny font, but can anyone recommend a plugin/extension for Firefox that can take webpages like this and trim out the excessive whitespace? I cannot read the text and increasing the size (control-+) just makes the white space bigger too.
- h2odragon 7y agoPretty! A bucket full of perlite and half full of water does a decent job too. The trouble lies in keeping the water topped off and keeping it clean, as with anything else evaporative.
- zweep 7y agoTo mildly humidify my baby son’s room without having to maintain a humidifier, I use a towel soaked in water, draped over a chair, with a fan pointed at it overnight.
- xvector 7y agoI've used this in the summer to cool down in apartments with no AC. 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...
- Dylan16807 7y agoWell, 600 square feet can be a studio but it's by no means a small studio. It's enough space for a perfectly comfortable 2 bedroom apartment. (Or 3 if you squeeze.) For a single room, if that towel holds a gallon it should work fine for an overnight humidification job.
- zweep 7y agoIt's very effective for humidification, the difference is immediately noticeable. The room is probably 100 square feet, I'm only humidifying it at night, so by your calculation it should take only about half a gallon of water which is probably what fits on a towel give or take.
- samatman 7y agoI don't know what the site author did to make it so the zoom button doesn't adjust the font size but I implore anyone similarly tempted: please don't do this.
- Zancarius 7y agoI think it's the viewport "user-scalable=no" meta tag value? 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!
- _Microft 7y agoIt's worse. The size of the text depends on the height of the window. Resize the window and it quickly becomes illegibly small.
- vezycash 7y agoIf you're using chrome or it's derivatives, install the extension ZOOM TEXT ONLY. For Firefox no extension is needed on desktop. Google how to do it. For Android Firefox, I use the add-on called LEGIBILITY.
- sm4rk0 7y agoThere's built-in "Reader View" in Firefox (both desktop and mobile). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- pkaye 7y agoIs this the same thing as a swamp cooler?
- nightfly 7y agoNo, a swamp cooler would actually work.
- phyzome 7y agoDepending on your water supply, this design may fill up very quickly with mineral deposits and stop wicking.
- ivanhoe 7y agoget an open top aquarium, it's much more rewarding and efficient way to increase the humidity of a room