Effective; Economical; Some routine maintenance required.
I have the predecessor that was black in color. It's 3 years old and still works great. Definitely evaporates lots of water into the air. The reservoir must be filled 2 to 3 times per day depending on how often your furnace comes on. It's somewhat of a chore but I get used to it. Keeping the household humidity at 60% or better surely makes lower thermostat settings tolerable so it's a money saver in that regard. The unit uses about 100 watts during its intermittent runs.
Mine is so accurate that it is almost perfectly synchronized to furnace operation. Furnace comes on and shortly thereafter the Lasko humidifier starts up. Furnace shuts off and shortly thereafter the humidifier shuts off. I presume the same accuracy is maintained in this newer white model.
These do use disposable paper filters. I use 2 per season. Cheapest source for the filters is direct from Lasko. I bought a box of 10 for $50 right after I bought the humidifier and I've got about 5...
No recurring costs
Our house is so well insulated that the furnace doesn't run often enough for a furnace-mounted humidifier to work well in our 255 s.f. house. As a result we've tried a number of different kinds of portable humidifiers.
The ultrasonics don't put out enough volume. Nor do the spray mist ones. The warm mist ones have a very high operating cost. For a couple of years we used a wick-and-fan humidifier that had plenty of capacity and ran quietly. The problem was that the wicking filters were expensive ($16 each) and rapidly lost their capacity: a filter that would wick 5 gallons a day was down to 1 gallon a day within two weeks. So even this solution cost us almost $1/day for filter replacements.
The Lasko Recirculating Humidifier seems to have solved this problem: instead of water being wicked up by the filter, the filter is wetted from the top by a little built-in aquarium pump - much in the way that furnace-mounted humidifiers work.
We've been using this...
Lasko 9 Gallon Humidifier
This is my second one of these. The first one performed well but quit working after 3 years. It was inexpensive so I bought another one. I bought a cheaper model this time that didn't have the LED displays the first one had. This one just has a knob with no readout of setting or room humidity. The reason I did that was the LEDs on the first one quit working after about two years. I figured this simpler one would be less likely to fail - who knows?
I keep it in the master bathroom and fill it twice a day from the tub. It uses a lot of water - which is what I want it to do, but without the convenience of the adjacent tub it would be a pain - all these portable ones probably have this problem.
I keep it on the medium fan setting and it seems fairly loud for the first few days but now I'm used to it and I don't notice it coming on and off.
The area around the unit remains dry so it works well as an evaporative humidifier - which is what you want it...
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