anyone use a humidifier? i've never owned one, but am seriously considering one for the winter. i've dealt with dry/cracked skin/hands for years and its ridiculously annoying. i figured might as well give a humidifier a go...even if it can help just a little. problem is it sounds like they're a pain to maintain...with the cleaning and all. am i just over thinking how much of a pain they are. how often are you stuck cleaning/replacing water and filters?
I've never cleaned mine. I originally bought it maybe a year and a half ago, used it for a few months, boxed it up, and recently took it out again and have had mine on constantly for a few days. I think the molding concerns are a bit overstated. Water is the only thing going in the humidifier, and no other organic material that mold would grow on. I think the manual said to clean it with diluted vinegar once a week. Still haven't until I see or smell something bad.
i'm just going off this: http://thesweethome.com/reviews/the-best-humidifier/ "The EPA says that you should clean your humidifier once every three days, but Dr. Cullen, whose background is in respiratory therapy, disagrees and warns that you should think about scrubbing yours out every day. “Humidifiers are just so perfect for bacterial growth,” Dr. Cullen explains. “We teach and tell people to clean and scrub them out every day. Because where they make the mist, where the water is either made into a steam from the ultrasonic or where it hits the baffle to be made into droplets, that is where the bacteria grows.” Dr. Cullen told me that in order to ensure that your humidifier is kept clean and safe, you should scrub its tank as well as any other hardware that comes into contact with water with a baby bottle brush and soap and water. She recommends Ivory dish soap because it’s cheap and doesn’t come loaded down with a harsh fragrance that could get spewed around your home later if you failed to rinse your humidifier out properly after cleaning it. “Soap and water is really good,” says Dr. Cullen, “but even more important than soap and water is just physically scrubbing, just like you’d scrub a dish. You can put soap and water on a dish, but you see it’s not clean. Then, let it drip-dry on a dry towel. You don’t want to get too much lint from a paper towel or a cloth in there because where the humidifier is making the water into a vapor, there are tiny little holes, and you don’t want those to get too clogged up.” What if you buy a humidifier with a built-in UV light or other microbe-fighting technology? Dr. Cullen says that you should still clean your hardware daily if you want to keep you and your family from breathing in any nasty of the nasty stuff that your humidifier’s capable of breeding. Better safe than sorry." dude recommends cleaning it everyday? damn...
i use an ultrasonic humidifier in winter….it stays clean with just a couple drops grapefruit seed extract in the tank once a month
