takahe.social
All right, I'm officially done with these Vornado evaporative style humidifiers, our water is so hard the wicks get half dried out wicked fast and then algae or something grows on the margin between the wet and dry parts of the wick.
In like 3-5 days from a rinse/dry/new-wick reset, tops.
Strongly considering trying a "wet mist humidifier" / vaporizer type instead, in hopes the boiling of the water and lack of a wick will lead to longer period before stinky.
I expect that like my actual teakettle, I'll have to descale the things often due to the hard water, but at least that's presumably an efficiency thing and not a "now my office smells faintly of bayou" thing.
Could potentially just use distilled water in either humidifier type, and I might, but that's even more bullshit I don't wanna deal with.
Really need to just bite the bullet and get a whole-house water softener (or maybe RO if I wanna be fancy).
@bitprophet I'm at this last point with our water too. Ours isn't horrible but it's bad enough that I can see how it might limit the life of some of our appliances.
As far as the humidifier goes, I use a cap full of some kill the algae stuff that was recommended and I'm going on ~6 years of usage off the same bottle. It seems to work.
@webology Hm, I read that those algae killers tend not to work super well. Not like it's a huge outlay to try presumably.
I need to fix the hard water issue first tho, an algae free humidifier that still barely does the job because the wick's hard, is still Not It.
@bitprophet re: not working - I'm not sure. I have never seen any growth in ours. We had one type that I'd have to refill once a day and then the random one that we leave and then dump a week or two after it's turned itself off and there is nothing growing in there. YMMV though. I do not regret getting the humidistat installed other than I do wish it worked better on days like today.
