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.
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.
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.
Especially evident on some black leather bags in the wardrobe.
Bigger particles are known to irritate the lungs and even cause asthma (google or ask gpt)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.