Freeing a Xiaomi humidifier from the cloud
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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...
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.
Especially evident on some black leather bags in the wardrobe.
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
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.
I also have one and love how easy it is to clean.
They are also mechanically simple, so I trust that if they ever break, I will be able to repair them.
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).
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).
1. We've reduced infant (and childhood) mortality. My comment isn't talking about this effect but it did drag down average life expectancy substantially. Including this effect life expectancy at birth in the stone age might have been as low as 20... but as you say the bimodality means this is a deceptive statistic when used this way.
2. We've made it so you on average live longer even if you survive childhood, my comment is really just about this part of the effect. It's still a simplification because saying "on average if you survive childhood you die at 40" isn't the same as "everyone dies at 40" but closer to "adults die at all ages in a reasonable smooth monotonic curve and 40 is about the average age they live to but some get lucky and live to 80 or whatever". But then "don't use ultrasonic dehumidifiers" is like this too, using one won't kill you at some specific age, it will just slightly increase your chance of death every year for the rest of your life however long that ends up being.
The number 40 was picked out of a hat, too. It should be right for some areas at some times just by coincidence though and since I was non-specific that makes me right ;)
And while the Bible includes plentiful mythological components, it also includes many historical and contemporary accounts. And this verse is certainly of the latter: "The length of our days is generally seventy years, or eighty years if one is strong, yet even the best of these years are filled with toil and sorrow, for they pass quickly and we fly away." That is part of the Old Testament (Psalms 90:10) that is believed to have been written somewhere from 1400-1200BC.
If you want more contemporary stuff that's completely indisputable you can also take random selections of people of renown. For instance the main Founding Fathers are a great example because they all were relatively young when their names become inexorably etched into history, yet their final life expectancy is again well into the 70s. The youngest major founding father to die was Hamilton, in a duel - at 49. Then Hancock died at 56 - likely of gout which can be caused by things like excessive indulgence. Next up was Washington who died at 67, probably more of the cure than the disease - he was leeched to the point of being pale as a ghost on his death bed. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Sam Adams, John Jay all lived to their 80s. John Adams made it to his 90s.
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I am not trying to claim these samples are representative. These were wealthy individuals who would be relatively immune to famine, war, and other such factors that could have a catastrophic effect on lower classes. But when speaking of life expectancy, I think we are implicitly asking the question 'how long could somebody reasonably expect to live xxxx years ago without access to modern medicine and technology.' And that's what this sampling of people answers.
Which translation is that? Or are you paraphrasing?
Most translations don't include "generally," and therefore read more as an upper bound "if one is strong" than an average.
The Victorians called, they want their Night Air Panic back.
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.
They avoid all these issues and require way less maintenance than any other solution.
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.
Do you want Legionnaire's Disease? Because that's how you get Legionnaire's Disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires...
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.
And the condensate water from an AC evaporator coil is not anything like distilled water, dust/bacteria are also in it.
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.
What's your PM2.5 baseline, and did you measure TDS in the water?
I haven't checked the TDS but when I used a water test strip for an aquarium early this year it was in the hard water range.
In the next room (where there were none) it was 6.
Depends on the water, I guess.
I have a couple ultrasonic humidifiers, if tap water is put in them it immediately sends the AQI on my air quality monitor into the "Dangerous" level. I have the monitor upstairs and it detected it when my girlfriend put tap water in the humidifier downstairs.
Purified or distilled water works fine. I bought a counter top water distiller because it was a pain lugging 15 gallons of water into the house every week all winter. You can see the residue of whatever was in the tap water at the bottom of the distiller after it runs and it doesn't look like anything I would want to be breathing.
Bigger particles are known to irritate the lungs and even cause asthma (google or ask gpt)
Use boiling type humidifiers (basically just electric tea kettles).
Been doing this for years.
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.
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.
Yes, I do still need to be present to empty the tank. But automated warnings when the tank is full (in combination with more intense 'room's LED lightbulb flashing red' when BOTH the tank is full AND humidity rises above 60%) are nice - otherwise, I'd have more mental load to check a little tiny LED on the device itself every two days or so, which, surprise, I would keep forgetting.
Why are outside sensors relevant in my use-case? Because running the dehumidifier is pointless when the window is open AND outside humidity exceeds inside humidity (and electricity is expensive where I live).
Secondary use-case: mould and 'rentee did not air out the humidity correctly' are some of the more common points of conflict between landlords and rentees over here. With my smart dehumidifier (and a few more sensors placed around the apartment and outside), I have a paper trail should this ever come in front of a judge that yes, in fact, I correctly fought humidity.
Is my use-case everyone's use-case? No. Am I probably over-engineering this? Sure, it's possible. Is it nice and kind to make broad paternalistic assumptions and snarky jokes on what and what not "anyone" really needs? Doubtful.
You're arguing from device capability. I’m arguing from human cognitive load and failure modes. The question isn't "can the (de)humidifier regulate humidity on its own?", but "how many low-level checks and mental reminders does it eliminate over months of use?". For people who forget, get distracted, or simply want fewer things to keep in mind, that's not dubious value - it's the entire point.
> I don't see any reason someone would want to turn it on and off based on presence.
Maybe someone doesn't want the noise when they are present? Some people like white noise, some don't.
> The amount of electricity these take to run isn't worth even mentioning.
Not everyone lives where you do and pays the electricity rates you do. What about people who generate their own electricity, live off a grid, or just plain want to conserve energy for a myriad a reasons? Turning off specific loads based on XYZ is useful.
> 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
Maybe the humidifier is in a low visible or less-trafficked area, and getting a reminder to fill it up would be useful.
What a terrible take you have on people's use case not exactly matching yours.
— 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).
Also curious about your power consumption - did you measure watts before/after switching from Xiaomi's cloud solution?