Ditto Booli. Thanks for sharing and it's clear a lot of work went into it. The one thing that I disagree on is whether or not a whole room or whole house humidifier works. So far my evidence suggests they do and when one has a several or more ukes, it's a lot easier than maintaining an army of case humidifiers.
The past few days the outside humidity here in NJ has been 98%, and today 86%, and with my utrasonic cool mist room humidifier running full blast, AND something else I rigged up sort of a ghetto-style humidifier to supplement the ultrasonic one, was a 5 gallon bucket from Home Depot, filled with water, with the handle propped up vertically, suspending a standard cotton bandana which extents about 18" into the bucket, and a 12" desk fan blowing down full blast on the surface of the water and also the bandana. If I turn off the fan, with the bandana's exposed part dry, it wicks water nearly up to the top, and when I put on the fan, even at the lowest setting, the bandana is dry to the touch in about 10 mins, but oddly enough the water level has only gone down about an inch per day, so it's not really efficient at dispersing moisture into the room like the ultrasonic unit, which you can see a fine mist of water vapor streaming from the top...
However, the past 2 days with this setup, my ambient RH in the room as per my own David Burgess calibrated Caliber IV hygrometer is up to 57% RH during the day, and now at 8PM it is at 48% RH and 66.6 degrees F...
Not sure if the boost in the indoor RH% is from the fact that outside humidity is higher past 2 days (and 56 F here in NJ in
DECEMBER, which almost never happens) or from the added ghetto-contraption I rigged up, which seems to be very slow at transmitting moisture.
[edit] I also tried individually: a thick cotton hand towel, some hemp mesh (think burlap) as well as cotton coil rope strands (comes in 20ft lengths, like a really LONG cotton ball, but I cut them to fit the bucket), and all of them remained fully wet even with the same fan on full blast, so methinks that I need some other way to agitate the water if I am going to use a thicker or denser material than a thin cotton bandana - I may have to end this experiment, but I'm going to give it another day.
For what it's worth . . . today I received a Caliber IV hygrometer from David Burgess (mentioned earlier in this discussion), and figured if nothing else it would tell me how far off my $10 Accurite gauges are (see photo - the lower number is the humidity). I will say that the Caliber IV is an easier fit in a case.
I have a few hygrometers like that in your photo as well that we got from Amazon ~$10 and keep in the basement and cellar, with a DE-humidifier in the warmer months to control mold and mildew growth in the damp basement...I thought since basement humidity causing mold growth is not an issue in the winter when the furnace is running a lot, I might 'borrow' one of those units and keep it next to my Caliber IV for a few days and see how far apart the readings are....