> On a tangent note: don’t use ultrasonic humidifiers. Unless distilled water is used, they create a shit-ton of pm2.5 particles.
Not according to my uHoo air quality monitor. I have had one running a few feet from the monitor for over a week and there hasn't been any notable increase in PM2.5 particles.
The ones I had for a bit basically fogged out the apartment immediately and left white (i’m guessing salt) deposits all over everything. I know you are supposed to use distilled but it’s cost prohibitive at the rate these blow through water unless you also have a home distillery.
You don't have to buy one either. A suspended wet towel with a fan blowing on it will work very well. If you want to get fancy, have the last inch or two of the towel sitting in a tray of water.
My brother's house in Perth, Australia has an antique air conditioning system in the roof space that works in exactly this principle. 4 blankets that wick up water and have air drawn through them and into the house by a fan. It's in disuse now but I understand they were common and quite effective in the day.
Don't use evaporative humidifiers(the motorized wet towel). I don't know if it actually cause legionellosis, but it's not very sanitary, and the sanitizing additives for those are known to be actually harmful.
Use boiling type humidifiers (basically just electric tea kettles).
Water evaporates alomost completely and is changed daily (I rinse both container and disks in the tub with high-pressure mode from showerhead), so I don’t think any contamination is likely.
Hard water often contains hard to dissolve minerals. An evaporative humidifier over the time accumulates limescale and it’s very difficult to remove it, you cannot just dissolve it. With ultrasound humidifier all this limescale will be in the air. Admittedly not in all regions the water is hard but if it is then ultrasound humidifier will be a bad choice.
Distilled water isn’t strictly necessary. I use mine with purified water with a reverse osmosis purifier. I periodically test the TDS of the water to confirm it is low. It’s fine.
The best solution I've found a few years ago is one Venta LW 45 for every 30 m² of space. That's enough to run them on the lowest speed while maintaining acceptable humidity and CO₂ levels.
Higher speeds are too noisy. Smaller machines evaporate less.
For sub-zero outside temperatures, it's necessary to add at least 5 g of water to each cubic metre of air coming from outside.
The recommended ventilation rate of 30 m³/h per person requires to evaporate 4 liters of water per day.
That’s a lot of refilling. You might want to look into a whole house humidifier, I added an aprilaire 700 evaporative to my hvac ducts, it costs a few hundred $. Plumbed in, automatic. So much less screwing around
Chinese I’ve mentioned blew Ventra out of the water. I’ve been using humidifiers for the last 15 years and switched to smartme around 5 or something like that (liked the idea of auto speed and was tired of aged squickness after many years of its predecessor).
Haven’t used the first generation. Had a couple of the second (they notoriously had water level sensor issue that could be fixed just enabling “drying mode” that always ran for 8h after the sensor thought there were no water).
Third gen is the charm.
Cheap, effective (pump, double-bottom for rounded instead of flat tank — uses evry last drop), quiter, 5L tank, less creak after a few years.
tldr; I only wish it lasted whole 24 hours when it is -5C and lower outside, but I guess that requires 7-8L.
Also, having a few helps with the noise (I have total of three in my apartment).
I'm currently using the Vornado EV100 non-IoT evaporative humidifier, and my only complaints are relatively minor, as humidifiers go (consumable wick, fan noise, insanely bright blue LEDs). https://www.vornado.com/shop/humidifiers/evaporative/ev100-e...
Drying clothes indoors is also effective. When I set up my laundry rack rh can surge by 30%. I imagine setting up a tray of water under a ceiling fan might be similarly effective.
It's funny in an ironic way because the original purpose of air conditioners was to remove humidity from the air, the mechanism used was to cool the air down thus forcing some of the moisture out. The general public quickly caught on that having cool air was nice in it's own right and that is the main purpose these days. however the dehumidifying function is still sometimes used, people are surprised when their air conditioner turns on at the same time as the heater (why are they fighting each other?) but that is because the system is trying to remove moisture from the air before it is heated. Mainly seen in cars so the windows don't fog up.
Probably something wrong with me but I just find it humorous trying to add moisture to a system designed to remove it. Really a reasonable request however, depending on where you live the air can get quite dry.
We didn't have access to modern technology... like ultrasonic speakers?
Also we died at a young age. Everyone dying at 40 isn't incompatible with the species surviving but it's what advice like that is usually trying to avoid (and even less extreme outcomes).
This is pretty crappy one-size-fits-all advice in itself.
If you’re willing to use distilled water, ultrasonic humidifiers have their own advantages over evaporative.
I’m personally willing to buy distilled water. It’s a dollar per gallon, and we only need the humidifier during a short few months. You can even buy a small countertop water distiller for under $60.
Doing some basic research... hard water is overwhelmingly various carbonate and bicarbonates of magnesium, calcium, sulfur, iron, maganese, and aluminum. All of which are essential nutrients and readily soluable in water.
The other proposed problem was pathogen aerosols- however I was unable to access anything but an abstract. So, I don't know if they survived being aerosolized, produced more and/or worse pathogen count than evaporative humidifiers, Nor the size of the pathogens.
It seems to me the known risk is mostly mechanical (Asthma, exacerbated COPD, etc) and nonpersistent (particles dissolve and are used or excreted via the same pathways as when consumed). With an unknown risk on the pathogen side.
This got me thinking about how my AC is somewhat ticking me off. A couple years ago I bought a smart AC, and when I got around to wanting to use the smart feature (via the app), I learned that I need to create a Tuya account and connect via that. Today I'm still manually pushing the buttons, as I wasn't having any of that, and the community Tuya tools I found out there are dependent on an account.
A couple weeks ago I took a preliminary look jailbreaking it. Main thing holding me back is a fear of bricking it and being left with an expensive, oversized paperweight, as the electricity here tends to chip at random times and could do so just at a critical point of the process. It also bugs me that I can find 0 information about the device; it's like the "Bluesonik" brand doesn't have an internet presence. But perhaps one day I'll just throw caution to the wind and attempt a Tasmota flash (without even knowing if the board is supported) and hope for the best, similar to when I rooted and flashed my first Android phone for the first time 15 years ago.
There is no danger of bricking the device by messing up a Tuya module firmware update; the module is always separate from the main device and communicates with it via a UART; even if you were to brick it the device would still work as a non-smart device.
Tangential rant: It’s becoming hard to buy dumb appliances.
I was looking at robot vacuums, and most need internet connection at least for setup - by which point it’s already uploaded your floor plan and who knows what to the cloud.
Not sure that’s a great example when you can easily buy a regular vacuum. Robot vacuums are sort of by definition already the “smart appliance” version of the “dumb appliance regular vacuum”.
I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The technology allows for robot vacuums to exist and I don’t see the cloud connection as a mandatory need for it. Similarly, I want my car to have say lane assist but we don’t expect to have cloud connection with it.
— you get notification on a phone when water is low;
— you can set automations for stuff like lower speed (noise) at night;
— make it turn off once the desired humidity is reached based on the other sensor (internal one is always off by 8-10% compared to a reading even 1m away).
It's becuase Xiaomi integrated it just like all of it's other smart home products with Mijia - Xiaomi's smart home mesh [0].
In Asia (but arguably the same in the West given the proliferation of Ring and smart home hubs), consumers have less of an aversion to smart home and connected products in general.
Keeping IoT devices on a separate segmented network with strict DMZing, turning off unused features, and not sharing passwords would provide enough security for most home users. I recommend reading James Micken's essay "The World is Ours" [1] on the diminishing returns of certain security features at the expense of user experience. I also agree with it as someone who used to do edgy stuff with SHODAN as a teenager.
HNers tend to be the minority amongst consumers, which is assuming the opposite of the HN herd mentality tends to be a fairly successful strategy.
But in a rare instance, xkcd is missing the point here. People do not live in their rooms 24/7, but they do want to be able to, e.g., turn stuff on or off remotely, or based on environmental conditions (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...) or to get status alerts ("tank empty, refill").
Now, I do that via Home Assistant and keep anything "smart" on a highly-restricted vnet ... but not everyone is a geek. While the standard implementation (some cloud service) comes with a bouquet of problems, it basically acts as a simplified Home Assistant, and ultimately as a necessary crutch. Preferably we'd be in IPv6-land, where ISPs would not NAT everything to death and we could talk to our devices remotely without an intermediary ... but well ... it cannot be helped.
"You're not going to need it" and "In my time, we just flipped a dumb switch" is paternalistic hogwash, not clever social commentary. Back in my days, we also didn't need satnav (just read a paper map), or cell phones (write them a note, leave it on the fridge, nothing is so important to demand imminence), or dishwashers (just do your dishes by hand)
Obviously all these smart appliance are about remote management, but I have to question how much usage it's getting in real life. My parents got a few smart devices for their holiday home, as my dad didn't want to drive 45 minutes both ways to check up on things during the winter. I think he probably ended up spending more time managing the IoT stuff that he ever did driving.
It create to have the option to manage something remote, but when remote become the only option, the usability takes a dive. When I have to go find my phone, unlock it, find the app, possible update the app, find the right setting or menu, stare at "Failure to connect to device", and whatever else might go wrong, it's quicker and easier to just manage the device directly. We got rid of our robot vacuum clear, because it's literally quicker and better to go get our 20 year old regular vacuum, and the floor is done in 3 minutes, not the 20+ the Roomba needs (and I needed to clear the room for it). When we used the Roomba, 99% of the time I pushed the "Start" button on the device, because it's way quicker than using the app.
There's a place for smart devices, but they need to be much better and have local controls.
I still think the value prop is dubious for a device like this.
> turn stuff on or off remotely
Why? Nearly all modern humidifiers have a sensor to measure humidity and will cycle on and off based on the setpoint. Getting to the setpoint also takes time so I don't see any reason someone would want to turn it on and off based on presence.
> (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...)
Not sure why the outside sensors would matter, it's concerned with the inside humidity which again it has a sensor to read. The amount of electricity these take to run isn't worth even mentioning.
> get status alerts ("tank empty, refill")
So you can refill it remotely? You have to be present to fill it anyway - just look at the thing and you'll know its water level
I say all this as someone who also run Home Assistant and automates various things.
Great project! This resonates with me - been using ESPHome for a year now and it's solid. One tip: if you're concerned about reliability, pair it with a PoE switch for your ESP devices. Makes recovery much easier if something goes wrong.
Also curious about your power consumption - did you measure watts before/after switching from Xiaomi's cloud solution?
A whole ass esp32 module in the board? Never seen something like that. I mean I've seen esp32 iot devices but with chips directly in the board, not as a separated module. It looks like hobbyist job.
Readit News
Use evaporative humidifiers (just disks with myriads of small notches for water to cling on and a fan): https://us.smartmiglobal.com/pages/smartmi-evaporative-humid...
Not according to my uHoo air quality monitor. I have had one running a few feet from the monitor for over a week and there hasn't been any notable increase in PM2.5 particles.
In the next room (where there were none) it was 6.
Depends on the water, I guess.
What's your PM2.5 baseline, and did you measure TDS in the water?
You don't have to buy one either. A suspended wet towel with a fan blowing on it will work very well. If you want to get fancy, have the last inch or two of the towel sitting in a tray of water.
But any thing beats nothing, I guess. Kudos to you
Use boiling type humidifiers (basically just electric tea kettles).
Been doing this for years.
Bigger particles are known to irritate the lungs and even cause asthma (google or ask gpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeehYYgl28
Especially evident on some black leather bags in the wardrobe.
Higher speeds are too noisy. Smaller machines evaporate less.
For sub-zero outside temperatures, it's necessary to add at least 5 g of water to each cubic metre of air coming from outside.
The recommended ventilation rate of 30 m³/h per person requires to evaporate 4 liters of water per day.
Haven’t used the first generation. Had a couple of the second (they notoriously had water level sensor issue that could be fixed just enabling “drying mode” that always ran for 8h after the sensor thought there were no water).
Third gen is the charm.
Cheap, effective (pump, double-bottom for rounded instead of flat tank — uses evry last drop), quiter, 5L tank, less creak after a few years.
tldr; I only wish it lasted whole 24 hours when it is -5C and lower outside, but I guess that requires 7-8L.
Also, having a few helps with the noise (I have total of three in my apartment).
I'm currently using the Vornado EV100 non-IoT evaporative humidifier, and my only complaints are relatively minor, as humidifiers go (consumable wick, fan noise, insanely bright blue LEDs). https://www.vornado.com/shop/humidifiers/evaporative/ev100-e...
Also no consumable parts there: just plastic disks which you clean with couple of spoons of citric acid dissolved in water from time to time.
I also wonder why mini-split heating systems drip and pool water outdoors instead of pumping that distilled water back indoors for humidification.
Probably something wrong with me but I just find it humorous trying to add moisture to a system designed to remove it. Really a reasonable request however, depending on where you live the air can get quite dry.
And the condensate water from an AC evaporator coil is not anything like distilled water, dust/bacteria are also in it.
And it is really not distilled water. It gathers dust and so on from air. Distilling in more so closed circuit, where as those are very much open.
Do you want Legionnaire's Disease? Because that's how you get Legionnaire's Disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires...
Also we died at a young age. Everyone dying at 40 isn't incompatible with the species surviving but it's what advice like that is usually trying to avoid (and even less extreme outcomes).
If you’re willing to use distilled water, ultrasonic humidifiers have their own advantages over evaporative.
I’m personally willing to buy distilled water. It’s a dollar per gallon, and we only need the humidifier during a short few months. You can even buy a small countertop water distiller for under $60.
Doing some basic research... hard water is overwhelmingly various carbonate and bicarbonates of magnesium, calcium, sulfur, iron, maganese, and aluminum. All of which are essential nutrients and readily soluable in water.
The other proposed problem was pathogen aerosols- however I was unable to access anything but an abstract. So, I don't know if they survived being aerosolized, produced more and/or worse pathogen count than evaporative humidifiers, Nor the size of the pathogens.
It seems to me the known risk is mostly mechanical (Asthma, exacerbated COPD, etc) and nonpersistent (particles dissolve and are used or excreted via the same pathways as when consumed). With an unknown risk on the pathogen side.
Unless you are anally retentive about cleaning it, ultrasonic humidifiers vaporize microbes into the air. There have been loads of studies about this.
The only real way to avoid this is to use the humidifiers that are boiling the water.
A couple weeks ago I took a preliminary look jailbreaking it. Main thing holding me back is a fear of bricking it and being left with an expensive, oversized paperweight, as the electricity here tends to chip at random times and could do so just at a critical point of the process. It also bugs me that I can find 0 information about the device; it's like the "Bluesonik" brand doesn't have an internet presence. But perhaps one day I'll just throw caution to the wind and attempt a Tasmota flash (without even knowing if the board is supported) and hope for the best, similar to when I rooted and flashed my first Android phone for the first time 15 years ago.
I was looking at robot vacuums, and most need internet connection at least for setup - by which point it’s already uploaded your floor plan and who knows what to the cloud.
The project was recently discussed on HN as well. It has its issues but it works.
https://xkcd.com/3109/
— you get notification on a phone when water is low;
— you can set automations for stuff like lower speed (noise) at night;
— make it turn off once the desired humidity is reached based on the other sensor (internal one is always off by 8-10% compared to a reading even 1m away).
In Asia (but arguably the same in the West given the proliferation of Ring and smart home hubs), consumers have less of an aversion to smart home and connected products in general.
Keeping IoT devices on a separate segmented network with strict DMZing, turning off unused features, and not sharing passwords would provide enough security for most home users. I recommend reading James Micken's essay "The World is Ours" [1] on the diminishing returns of certain security features at the expense of user experience. I also agree with it as someone who used to do edgy stuff with SHODAN as a teenager.
HNers tend to be the minority amongst consumers, which is assuming the opposite of the HN herd mentality tends to be a fairly successful strategy.
[0] - https://www.mi.com/global/smart-home/
[1] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
But in a rare instance, xkcd is missing the point here. People do not live in their rooms 24/7, but they do want to be able to, e.g., turn stuff on or off remotely, or based on environmental conditions (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...) or to get status alerts ("tank empty, refill").
Now, I do that via Home Assistant and keep anything "smart" on a highly-restricted vnet ... but not everyone is a geek. While the standard implementation (some cloud service) comes with a bouquet of problems, it basically acts as a simplified Home Assistant, and ultimately as a necessary crutch. Preferably we'd be in IPv6-land, where ISPs would not NAT everything to death and we could talk to our devices remotely without an intermediary ... but well ... it cannot be helped.
"You're not going to need it" and "In my time, we just flipped a dumb switch" is paternalistic hogwash, not clever social commentary. Back in my days, we also didn't need satnav (just read a paper map), or cell phones (write them a note, leave it on the fridge, nothing is so important to demand imminence), or dishwashers (just do your dishes by hand)
It create to have the option to manage something remote, but when remote become the only option, the usability takes a dive. When I have to go find my phone, unlock it, find the app, possible update the app, find the right setting or menu, stare at "Failure to connect to device", and whatever else might go wrong, it's quicker and easier to just manage the device directly. We got rid of our robot vacuum clear, because it's literally quicker and better to go get our 20 year old regular vacuum, and the floor is done in 3 minutes, not the 20+ the Roomba needs (and I needed to clear the room for it). When we used the Roomba, 99% of the time I pushed the "Start" button on the device, because it's way quicker than using the app.
There's a place for smart devices, but they need to be much better and have local controls.
> turn stuff on or off remotely
Why? Nearly all modern humidifiers have a sensor to measure humidity and will cycle on and off based on the setpoint. Getting to the setpoint also takes time so I don't see any reason someone would want to turn it on and off based on presence.
> (turn on/off based on outside sensors or the current electricity price...)
Not sure why the outside sensors would matter, it's concerned with the inside humidity which again it has a sensor to read. The amount of electricity these take to run isn't worth even mentioning.
> get status alerts ("tank empty, refill")
So you can refill it remotely? You have to be present to fill it anyway - just look at the thing and you'll know its water level
I say all this as someone who also run Home Assistant and automates various things.
Also curious about your power consumption - did you measure watts before/after switching from Xiaomi's cloud solution?