But because these humidifiers are hot and can cause burns, you need to be careful with them. One benefit of this type of humidifier is that boiling the water destroys bacteria and germs. The warm mist produced goes into the air, increasing humidity.
Warm-mist humidifiers: Electricity or another type of energy goes into the system to boil the water, changing it from liquid to gas. There are three main types, she says, each with their own technology. “All humidifiers put water vapor into the air, but they do that in different ways,” says Sarah Drake, brand manager of seasonal humidifiers at Helen of Troy, the parent company behind Vicks and Honeywell humidifiers. We wanted to learn how they actually work and what we can do to make them work better. We decided to look into why finding the perfect humidifier - or even a passable, not impossible to clean, somewhat quiet one that doesn’t smell like spoiled milk - could be so hard. It’s like we’re all lining up, asking to be disappointed. New parents, people with dry skin, anyone prone to nosebleeds - nearly 10 million people buy humidifiers in the United States every year. It’s that, through the machines’ fault or ours, all humidifiers are terrible.
That’s the heart of the thing: It’s not that one model is terrible. Frankly, as with printers, humidifiers are pretty frustrating.” That might have been Wirecutter’s feeling when it tweeted this response: “We’re sorry to hear so many of you have had such bad experiences with our top pick. Reading through the frustration (and having experienced quite a bit of it ourselves), the Strategist couldn’t help but wonder whether there are better options out there or if we should all just give up on humidifiers. People who didn’t own the HCM-350 had war stories of their own - humidifiers that gurgled or buzzed, that leaked or spread white dust throughout the room, that were coated with mold so quickly they couldn’t keep up. A few even bitterly tagged the review site Wirecutter, which has listed the HCM-350 as its top pick among humidifiers since 2015. Lashbrook describes the HCM-350 as a “loud, messy, impossible to clean monstrosity,” and many fellow owners took to the comments to agree.
#THE WIRECUTTER HUMIDIFIER FREE#
This was thanks mostly to Angela Lashbrook’s rant against the Honeywell HCM-350 Germ Free Cool Mist Humidifier, which grew into a cathartic group airing of grievances. In the last couple of weeks, a certain corner of Twitter has been very angry about humidifiers. Photo: oneworld picture/Getty/Universal Images Group via Getty