Solid humidifier with a few extra useful features
If you're in the market for a humidifier, you know they're largely cut from the same cloth. This one is no different on a fundamental level, but there are few things that differentiate it. 1) Many models let you set humidity level, but their humidistats are trash, which renders the functionality useless. This model has a surprisingly accurate humidistat, which agrees with my Nest thermostat within 1 or 2%. 2) Adding water to this humidifier is easy. There's a door on the top you can open, so you can add it without taking anything apart. It also has a nice flow so you can pour in the water quickly. I've seen other models with a similar feature, but that overflow if you add water too fast. 3) This is a cool mist humidifier, but you can also select warm mist. It doesn't turn it into a steamer, but has an element that heats the mist. This is useful if you are using the humidifier because forced heat is drying your air. Cool mist naturally cools the air, but warm mist helps mitigate that. It comes at cost, though. I measured this humidifier on its highest mist setting using cool mist as using 56 watts of electricity. That goes up to 273 watts if you use the warm mist function. 4) The humidifier has casters that are useful for moving the machine from room to room. It holds nearly 5 gallons of water, so you definitely don't want to pick it up if it's not completely empty. You don't have to use the casters, and the unit will sit fine on a table without them. 5) One rather odd thing is if you don't use the tube attachment for the mist and go with the nozzles, the unit puts out much more on the right side. There's not much you can do about this as its due to the positioning of the atomizers. They aren't centered, so most mist comes out the right side of the opening. This isn't an issue if you use the tube as it channels all the mist together, but the 360 degree nozzle attachment will always produce less mist on the left side. 6) The advertised auto restart function works. I've never seen an electronically controlled humidifier that didn't reset after power disruption before. This is useful if you experience power outages or move the unit from room to room. All in all, this is a solid unit that outputs the expected amount of mist for a machine with dual atomizers. A few extra bells and whistles and a mostly reliable humidistat help it stand out from the crowd. Read more
