Grow tip: wick humidifiers might be better.
I just watched an informative video on different types of humidifiers and how they work. The disadvantages of the ultrasonic humidifiers that are popular now seem way worse. They can put anything living in the water into the air more easily and apparently you don’t need distilled water with the old style humidifiers that use wicks instead either. You need to replace the wicks every so often instead. I’ve clogged a carbon filter with white dust not using distilled water and I hate buying like 10-15 bottles every grow so going to test the wick ones out. Anyone got got any experience with these? Is it true that I don’t need distilled water?
- 2 Replies
If you do use a dehumidifier though you can use the water from the that for your humidifier as well.
Hanging towels in my tent I don’t use distilled water so I would think a wick would be the same, a wick type humidifier is not heated is it?
I’ve looked into this a bit and I can’t see anything saying they are or are not.
Now you have me thinking as well because my Taotronics one pooped out after 1 veg cycle.
Keep us informed if you do go this way.
Happy Growing!!
Update: They’re a lot weaker than ultrasonic humidifiers so you’d need a lot bigger of one to match it I think. Could work better for a grow room though with one of the big ones designed for a house. The filters seem to get dirty really fast so keep these off the ground. You can rinse them. If you let it run dry it seems to be ruining the filter so you have to stay on top of topping it off. The fan gets noisy on mine and it’s hard to service. The fan doesn’t come off the hub. A bit of a nuisance. If this was scaled up with a more modular design though, it’d be great and I think you could extend the life of the filters by figuring out what kind of chemical they use to kill bacteria. With PC water cooling, they use biocides like PT nuke and I have a feeling that a couple of drops in your tap water would work just as well. They say not to wash the filters with vinegar or detergent because it’ll wash out the anti-bacterial stuff, but you could definitely add them back. I’d want to do research on the safety of that stuff first just in case anything off gasses from it that’s nasty, but I think it’d be fine.
So, I’m conclusion, they do work with tap water instead of distilled but they have to be bigger to put out as much. It will go through its tank once a day still so it may be just enough. I still haven’t used it in the tent. I’m using it for my whole apartment for now so it may work out in the tent in winter when the exhaust fan doesn’t kick on as often and the humidity can build up more, but I can definitely tell that the ultrasonic one can fill up a room and correct the humidity way faster so they’re definitely still going to be ideal for that.
The one interesting takeaway is that this concept is so simply that it wouldn’t be hard to DIY one of these in a pinch. Just a fan in front of something that can wick water out of a bucket or something that’s light proof with something to nuke bacteria even just 5-10% peroxide should work. Since we’re basically living in the covidocolypse and the supply chain is iffy, this may be useful to someone anyways.
