If you live in a cold climate, you may run into problems with low humidity in the winter. This causes sore throats and colds and flu.
If you look on Amazon, the only humidifiers available are ultrasonic.
These have a serious problem. They emit a great deal of calcium dust. This covers everything. If you turn the lights out and shine a LED flashlight straight up, you can see the dust in the air. It goes everywhere.
OK, you think to yourself, it's unsightly, but it's better than the sore throats and flu from low humidity.
Unfortunately, there is another problem. Unknown to you, the dust is collecting in the fins of the aluminum heat sink that is cooling your cpu.
Pretty soon, it will overheat and shut off. What do you do without a computer? Not much.
The solution is a warm mist humidifier. The has a small chamber that heats water to the boiling point, just like a kettle. The steam contains no calcium. This collects on the heating element, which you have to remove periodically with vinegar.
These humnidifiers are hard to find. I bought one on Amazon. The link is
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So far, I am very pleased with the performance. Turning the lights out and shining the LED flashlight in the air shows absolutely no dust floating around. My eyeglasses are not covered with a white film every time I sleep. Highly recommended.
Very important: Top fill warm mist humidifiers are extremely rare. Watch out for bottom fill units, like the Vicks
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Bottom fill units are extremely difficult to deal with. You have to take the chamber to the sink, wrestle with the unlock cap, fill the unit with water, screw the cap back on, take the unit back to the humidifier, and try to get it back on the humidifier. I tried to do this with the Honeywell HWM845BC humidifier:
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and gave up. I donated it to the trash bin. Top fill only.
Not true. My wife has one. Search for "evaporative humidifier". This uses a wick and fan, but does not heat the water.
The water tank is removable, and can be filled in the kitchen sink. One does have to take the bottom of the unit to the sink and wash it out maybe once a month.
Are you using a humidifier for medical purposes? If so, it's commonly called a nebulizer:
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There are a variety of technologies available (jet, mesh, ultrasonic, boiling water, etc). Anything that will produce an aerosol. Lots of uses ranging from medicine delivery to compensating for the drying effects of oxygen bottles and concentrators. For recreational use, I built one long ago while in college that would volatilize alcoholic beverages. The basic principle is that the water aerosol also carries the drugs and sometimes whatever is in the humidifier/nebulizer water tank.
Up until about a year ago, I was in the computah repair business. I've seen incredibly filthy computers, including many with power supply and CPU heat sinks clogged with all manner of airborne crud that did an excellent job of ruining air flow. Computah manufacturers have known about this problem for at least 25 years and have protected their devices with thermal throttling algorithms. OS vendors have done their part with APM (advanced power management). Slow down the CPU or video card clock rate and the CPU will not overheat. Google search and YouTube should produce a variety of CPU/GPU cooling contraptions ranging from refrigeration to a gasoline driven water pump. Linus Tech Tips is full of them:
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Here's the gasoline engine powered water cooling system:
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(12:43) With the exception of older AMD CPU's[1], *all* of this century's CPU's and GPU's do thermal throttling. If you unplug the fan(s), the clock will slow down as the CPU or GPU gets hot and eventually settles at around 75C to 85C maximum. If for some reason the temperature goes above the limit, the computer and power supply will shut down and turn off. For what it's worth, I haven't seen a dead CPU in the last 20 years (except for early AMD CPU's). I have seen some dead GPU's, but those were caused by creative overclocking, not overheating.
I tried avoiding my computer(s) for a few days to see if it was possible. I lasted about 2 days and gave up. Computers are addictive.
I have a more tradition version of such a device. During winter, I heat my house with a wood burning stove:
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One of the side effects of burning firewood for heat is that it really dries out the air. So, I leave a tea pot full of tap water to boil. I can easily evaporate a gallon of water in 12 hrs.
However, there's a nasty side effect to boiling tap water. Some of the lime (calcium oxide) in the water hitches a ride on the water aerosol. Only a small percentage of the lime would go airborne, but it was enough to cover the house with white dust after a few winters of boiling tap water on the wood burner. The result was a runny noise that lasted all winter. I switched to boiling de-ionized water (steam iron water), which solved the problem.
Incidentally, I also use vinegar to remove the lime scale from the tea pot. However, in 2020, I had to use HCl (hydrochloric acid) to remove the lime scale. Vinegar and CLR were too weak. What changes was that we had a rather large brush fire that melted many of the plastic water tanks and pipes in the area. So, the water district switched from surface water sources (rivers and streams) to underground sources (wells), which have much more dissolved lime. If the amount of lime in the water is an issue, there are "water hardness test kits":
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.
Ummm... That's fairly extreme. I suggest you have your water tested. Meanwhile, switch to de-ionized or distilled water for the humidifier/nebulizer/evaporator.
[1] Old AMD CPU's relied on a thermistor temp sensor on the motherboard to measure and control the temperature. If the thermistor was dislodged or the CPU was mounted badly, the CPU would overheat and die a horrible, but quick, death.
IMHO it is a bit ridiculous using an ultrasonic humidifier on a cold climate (they cool the room).
In the 90's I saw in Canada humidifier that apparently used electrolysis of the water with AC. They just put two electrodes into the water, the gases recombined instantly into warm steam. They were top fill, and they would stop with no water without needing any sensor. The water tank was big.
The only problem I noticed is that the two electrodes corroded (iron, apparently) and thus the unit died.
I don't know if this is possible to do with 230 AC mains. Here (Spain) I have not seen them.
I would not drink those beverages. My chemistry knowledge is not good, but I seem to remember that the electrolysis of salty water generated chloride as one of the gases. Who knows what you get with tea, sugar, milk... I'm certainly not going to try.
However, those humidifiers I saw did not generate that much heat, the water did not boil (maybe part of it?). Warm, yes, certainly. And there was no manner to touch the water or the electrodes.
That's a boiling water system. It's not electrolysis at work, but resistive heating of water that causes it to actually boil. Yes, there's probably some hydrogen and oxygen give off, but it's minor. Those systems use canisters with sealed in expanded metal electrodes. They eventually corrode and fail. That's supposed to happen when there's finally too many minerals built up anyways. They utilize "rinse" cycles to try to clear themselves out as well, so it's not a consumables scam, like with printer cartridges.
Condair (formerly Nortec) makes the big ones which are popular for use in datacenters. There's the nonstop battle of airconditioning that never shuts off and the need for humidity. Dry air doesn't conduct heat as well and can cause static electricity problems.
That's like the DeVilbiss 145 I mentioned upthread. Works like the bomb. Somebody mentioned that the electrodes are nickel-free stainless, so not a huge deal to replace if you keep the surface area constant. They used to sell replacements, but good luck finding them in 2022.
Jeff Liebermann snipped-for-privacy@cruzio.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Tere's that goddamned "lamah" word again, which completely destroys any crdibility you ever had. Simply by embracing and never abandoning such a stupid term.
And the really sad part is that I KNOW you have more character than that stupid shit term you refuse to give up even after decades of looking stupid for using it. Such a lamah.
If you intend to demonstrate your linguistic abilities and immortalize your terminology, it might be helpful if you would contrive terms that are more memorable and clever. Your habit of attaching "tard" as a suffix to everything you fail to appreciate is not particularly clever or imaginative. Keep trying, or simply borrow some of the terms that pre-teenagers are prone to invent. English is a dynamic and ever changing language. Adapt to the changes or resign yourself to joining the fate of static or dead languages:
I see about ~2000 (used) computers each year. I've yet to find one that didn't have a heatsink coated (or filled!) with dust-bunnies, etc. Laptops are the worst!
I can understand folks being lazy and not wanting to open/disassemble a machine for better access to the heatsink(s). But, you can remove *some* of it just by forcefully pulling air through the heatsink from outside the machine (not true of bigger machines with "active" heatsinks).
OTOH, aside from laptops, most (quantities deployed) modern machines open without resorting to tools. So, it's not a HUGE burden to undertake that bit of PM.
You also have to look at memory temperatures.
Most users don't know what to expect from their machines, in terms of performance. So, won't notice if it is operating at full speed or not.
And that dust includes the trace asbestos often found in drinking water.
There is another choice. An evaporative unit; such as a "water wheel" with a fan, where all the solids are left on the foam or fiber belt/pad. Lasko, alas, discontinued the one they made.
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