Serious design flaws make buying this a serious mistake!

This review will be deliberately long so that customers know what to fully expect with this humidifier and with warm-mist humidifiers in general. I’ve learned a lot about them in recent months and I hope that my discoveries will be of great help in others’ buying decisions.

After about nine seasons of faithful operation, the Duracraft warm-mist humidifier that I had bought at Sears finally quit. I don’t believe it had an output of more than 2 gallons per day, but if the humidity dial was set even a little too high that little unit would have water condensing on the walls in only a few hours. And when we moved to a place that had forced air heating, placing it near the cold-air intake brought our whole house to a comfortable humidity level in short order as well. So even though it was very difficult to control its humidity level, the Duracraft unit had very effective output for its size and therefore my expectations were the same if not better for our next warm-mist humidifier.

After browsing our local stores I noticed a lot of Honeywell models, both warm and cool mist. So the thought struck me that perhaps they had this whole humidification thing down to a fine art. At first, I tried the 4 gal. Honeywell cool-mist unit, but it was somewhat noisy even at the lowest setting and the cool air that blasted out the side of the unit was not a welcome feeling when walking past it or sitting nearby!

So this unit was promptly returned in favor of the Honeywell 4 gal. warm mist (model HWM-335). However, oddly enough, after a couple of weeks the unit simply died on us despite faithful maintenance, and no amount of help from the company’s phone service reps was able to solve the problem. Not only that, it seemed to have to run for a long time in order to bring just our bedroom to a comfortable humidity level (about 35% but no more). And as for placing it near our cold-air intake, there was little if any impact upon our household humidity. But I figured it had still done its job in our bedroom area, yet only after a lot longer than I thought it would (based upon my Duracraft experience). Anyhow, frustrated at a lack of success, I returned the unit for a full refund and thought I’d wait a few months until the fall of 2006 to try to find an effective humidifier again.

Fast-forward now a few months now to November 2006. Again, I browsed the local stores and saw the Honeywell humidifiers dominating the shelves. So for whatever reason, I decided to give the warm-mist one another shot thinking perhaps the first one was an unusual dud, and this time chose the 3-gal. model (HWM-330). Frankly, I don’t know what I was thinking! The output of this humidifier was absolutely no match for the dry air coming out of our heat ducts. Humidity only rose to a maximum of 32% within five feet of the unit and was a measly 26% fifteen feet across the room. Even if we turned the fan to the high-speed setting, which sounded like a boiling kettle, the result was no better. This was still after days of non-stop operation. I was so dismayed that I didn’t think of placing it near our furnace’s cold-air intake this time.

In addition to the HWM-330’s pitiful moisture output, I found scale deposits very thick even after a week and difficult to remove from the small heating plate even after pre-treating the reverse-osmosis treated water with water softener. I found that what de-scaler couldn’t remove, I had to scrape off with the dull edge of a spoon (to reduce scratching).

And those “mineral absorption pads” that come with the unit frankly aren’t worth the substance they’re made from. With the 4 gal. warm-mist model we had initially purchased, the pads definitely absorbed scale and minerals, and it was great that you could rinse the pads a couple of times before having to discard them. But I didn’t anticipate when going to clean the heating plate one day that the pad would be burned onto the plate! So if cleaning the plate hadn’t been a chore before, it was certainly more of one then. Therefore, I never even used them with the HWM-330.

One more complaint: the water tank has to be held upright in order to be filled, or else it tips over. I was used to a flat-topped tank on the Duracraft that allowed you to do other things while the tank was being filled. Also, sometimes it’s awkward to have to hold the tank while it’s being filled; I simply can’t imagine how someone with arthritis or some kind of hand or wrist injury must feel having to hold several pounds of water upright while this tank is being filled and then lift it out of the sink.

After getting a full refund and resuming my search once again, I pondered why these very slick-looking Honeywell units were constantly disappointing me, and I realized that their current models all have the same “Achilles heel”: THE SMALL HEATING PLATE. Think about this: you have this circular heating plate that is maybe four inches in diameter, and you’re expecting that little thing to boil off enough water to properly humidify an area of more than a few hundred square feet? And don’t let the ‘Quicksteam’ label fool you; I’ve learned through experience that a little heating plate can boil and churn as fast as it wants, but that small area simply cannot compete in the dry air of a forced-air heating environment. And what happens as scale begins to build up on even a small portion of that heating plate? Even a smaller area of effective heating ability remains.

My old Duracraft humidifier had a heating element that that hung down into the water tray in an L-shape below the main unit, and the horizontal end of that L formed a circle. Now this element was about one inch thick, including the circular portion, and therefore water could be heated on all sides of that element. So with a lightning bolt of revelation, I realized that little unit was so quick and powerful simply because ITS MUCH LARGER SURFACE AREA WAS ABLE TO HEAT A MUCH LARGER AMOUNT OF WATER AT A TIME. It’s no wonder, then, that it was able to do what I described before.

So although this review has been very long, some of you might want to know how this story ends. Not wanting a Duracraft-type unit again (simply because of the difficulty of adjusting humidity levels, and how it was even harder to clean the element than on the Honeywells), I decided on a King Kong-sized cool-mist unit, the Emerson MoistAir HD1305 Whole-House Evaporative Humidifier. I decided that cool-mist was fine if it blasted straight upwards instead of sideways, and I knew for sure that it didn’t need to be right next to the cold-air intake in our narrow hallway in order to effectively humidify the whole house. After 12 hours at the lowest fan setting (which was surprisingly quiet), the Emerson got our entire house to a minimum 33% humidity level with the unit still about 20 feet from the cold-air intake. (Anyhow, I’ll probably write a review of the Emerson, so I’ll spare the details.) So I opted for powerful output instead of compact size, but that’s the alternative that worked for us unless I had chosen another warm-mist unit that had a large heating element/plate. Be sure to open the box and check the heating element size of a warm-mist humidifier before you buy one!

So to summarize, be aware of the following when choosing a humidifier:

1. Is your home hot-water heated or forced-air heated? If forced-air, consider a warm-mist unit with a large heating element or else get a high-output, cool-mist unit. If hot-water heated, perhaps the Honeywell units will work better because they won’t be competing with strong currents of warm, dry air.
2. Always buy a humidifier that is rated to cover an area greater than the area of your home. For example, the Emerson cool-mist humidifies a 2,700 sq. ft. area but our house is only 1,500 sq. ft. However, it doesn’t run continually which represents an energy savings plus less wear-and-tear, less frequent cleaning and water refilling, etc.
3. Place the unit as close as possible to the air intake of a furnace if you want to humidify your whole house. However, make sure your warm-mist unit has enough output (i.e. large enough heating plate) to accomplish this!
4. As I mentioned before, take a unit out of the box and inspect just how it plans to humidify the size of the area listed on the box (ex. heating plate size). Again, the HWM-330 couldn’t effectively humidify more than 200 sq. ft. even though the box said it would humidify a minimum of 600 sq. ft. In this case, the small heating plate size just couldn’t compete with the forced-air furnace.
5. Make sure the water tank’s shape makes it easy to refill.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I sincerely hope that it was worth it!