Not worth the money

I bought this humidifier at Bed Bath & Beyond with one of their 20% off coupons. I took it home, tried it out, and found that it did such a poor job I returned it the next day. There were several problems:

First, filling the tank: not only do you have to pull the tank out, turn it over, and unscrew a cap with a valve on it, but it is nearly inevitable that you will spill some water while doing so, because the output of steam comes out of a large hole in the top, which has a loose-fitting steam nozzle on it, which will fall out if you don't remember to take it out.

This is pretty much normal (although it shouldn't be--I mean, really, how hard is it to put a valve on the bottom of a tank and a little door on the top?) but what isn't normal is that the tank won't sit flat when it's upside-down, so you'll have to stabilize the tank while you fill it with about 15 pounds of water.

Second, while this humidifier is quiet, there was no attempt made to isolate the motors (one for the fan, one for the ultrasonic membrane) from the outside of the unit. Not only could I hear noise when this was running, but the noise increased when the steam output was increased.

Third, it has expensive "ionic silver sticks" which cost about as much as a cheap humidifier every year, and expensive demineralization cartridges which needs to be replaced every 2-3 months.

Finally, after running this all night and part of the day, it failed to raise my 140 sq. ft. bedroom to an acceptable humidity level. It struggled to get up to 37%. Since the box says it will humidify up to 860 sq. feet, this was a real disappointment.

In a nutshell, this humidifier is very expensive, poorly designed for day-to-day use, requires expensive maintenance items, and doesn't humidify even 1/7th the square footage that it promises to humidify. I don't know of a good humidifier to recommend in its place, but this certainly fails to be worth its price.