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TECHNOLOGY
I Have Hated Every Humidifier We Have Ever Owned
Maybe this one will be different?
In 1973, six years after our marriage, my wife and I bought our first house, a small Cape on a side street near a lake and the center of town. The unfinished second floor would become our older daughter's room and that of our second, born the next year.
That project included replacing the existing hot air heat with baseboard hot water radiators, but we still needed winter humidification as well as summer dehumidifying.
That’s where I learned to hate humidifiers.
Steam or cool mist
I do not remember being able to buy cool mist models back then; everything we owned was vaporizing water by boiling it. The units were small, often not even lasting eight hours, and they quickly built up scale from minerals in the water. They were somewhat dangerous because of the boiling water and were very difficult to keep clean and descaled.
In 2005, we moved to an over-55 community and again found ourselves with hot air heat, which dries out the air much more than baseboard hot water. I bought more steam humidifiers, but keeping up with their cleaning needs was extraordinarily time-consuming.
