Finally bought a decent room humidifier

The last three or four weeks have been so dry I can barely keep up with filling humidifiers for all of my ukes. I normally check them once a week and sometimes only have to fill every other week. I've been having to fill them every five days and the digital hygrometer in the room hasn't gone over 27% once for a couple of weeks now, and has been hovering around 20% most of the time.

So, I was at the store today and picked up one of those tower humidifiers with the digital control and whatnot. We'll see how well it manages to control this small room with all my computers running and everything (I actually have to run a window AC in the room even during the winter when we are using the furnace to heat the rest of the house). Unless the temperature outside drops to near freezing I have to run at least the fan on the window unit or this room goes over 80 degrees.

Anyway, at first I balked at paying almost $200 for a humidifier - then I thought about how much I have invested just in the ukuleles and guitars in this room and figured it's cheap insurance.

With any luck I might even end up with fewer sinus problems since I practically live in this room.


John

Yeah, very good insurance. I ended up with added humidity control on my furnace, in the music room, and in the instrument cabinet. Thinking about converting a walk-in freezer into a music vault.
Too much?

My music room has a lot of electronic gear. I have tried a room humidifier in the past but had a hard time avoiding humidity swings with it. The combo of trying to keep the electronic gear happy and not having the moisture in the instruments porpoising all the time brought me back to individual humidifiers. Hope yours is more stable than the one I used.

stevepetergal said:

Yeah, very good insurance. I ended up with added humidity control on my furnace, in the music room, and in the instrument cabinet. Thinking about converting a walk-in freezer into a music vault.
Too much?

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Nah, not too much. If I had a walk in freezer I think that would be a good use for it!

John

bborzell said:

My music room has a lot of electronic gear. I have tried a room humidifier in the past but had a hard time avoiding humidity swings with it. The combo of trying to keep the electronic gear happy and not having the moisture in the instruments porpoising all the time brought me back to individual humidifiers. Hope yours is more stable than the one I used.

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So far so good. The humidity drops and the machine comes on every time I open the door to the room, of course, but that is normal. It's average humidity that counts and this thing seems to be holding it right at what I set it at. It took a few hours to get the whole room up to 50% (I have another digital hygrometer on the other side of the room near the window AC and it was initially lagging the one on the humidifier).

I dialed the humidity setting back to 45% as 50% seemed almost too much - I guess because I'm used to it being so dry. I also set the fan speed on the unit to low and it cycles less often now.

John

Does this mean we're going to see a batch of glitter tube humidifiers available on the Marketplace?

Back when I had some uber expensive classical and flamenco guitars, I bought a nice Hunter evaporative type humidifier. The RH was 20% until I turned on the humidifier, and then was easily 45%. Better yet, we humans were more comfortable. The house felt warmer at the same temperature when the humidity was higher.

cantsing said:

Does this mean we're going to see a batch of glitter tube humidifiers available on the Marketplace?

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Nah, but it means I won't be nuts going from case to case swapping humidifiers with the ones in the water jug. Now I'll just leave 'em in the jug and pop some in a case when I travel.

John

Ha! I love my glitter tube humidifiers! they work well and are easy to use.

??????????? What is a glitter tube Humidifier??

Oasis humidifier

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51peJPSl1rL._SX466_.jpg

This thread pushed me over the edge to bring up a stored room humidifier. When we lived in the Chicago area, we desperately needed them for all our bedrooms, but here in the desert, not so much. But my office is nice and comfy, and the white noise may just lull me to sleep . . . .

suburude said:

??????????? What is a glitter tube Humidifier??

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Glitter that children use for projects comes in plastic tubes at Wal Mart. After the grandkids use the glitter I drill a bunch of 1/16" holes in the sides, toss in a few "water crystals" from the garden section at Lowes, and then dunk the whole shebang into a jar of water for a couple of days (the extra crystals ooze through the holes that way).

Very good, and cheap, case humidifiers. They're the perfect size to fit between the strings in the sound hole of most ukes.

John