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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
We got one this year. "Setup" meant pairing with our devices plus the account we had to create with the manufacturer. It didn't map the place until after that. I assume they all work this way.
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 49.0 ms ] threadUse 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...
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.
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.
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.
I also wonder why mini-split heating systems drip and pool water outdoors instead of pumping that distilled water back indoors for humidification.
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.
Use boiling type humidifiers (basically just electric tea kettles).
https://xkcd.com/3109/
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.
Also curious about your power consumption - did you measure watts before/after switching from Xiaomi's cloud solution?
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.