Please redirect if there is a more appropriate community for this question.

I’m dealing with dry air, and the humidifiers I had bought before got the tiniest grits of dust or something in them and leaked their whole tank of water. Turns out they needed purified water or distilled water to function long term.

I just want to put tap water into a thing and get humidity into the air. Any suggestions?

  • anguo
    161·
    6 hours ago

    Are you talking about an ultrasonic humidifier? AFAIK, those shoot out tiny water particles along with any bacteria that might be present, creating a health risk. You’re meant to only use distilled water with those.

    • Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
      21·
      3 hours ago

      That’s why you change the water daily. If your tap water is chlorinated it can be assumed to be safe enough for atomizing.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
      62·
      6 hours ago

      I’m confused. How is putting bacteria from water in the air worse than drinking the bacteria in the water directly?

        • voracitude@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 hours ago

          That is simply not correct in any way, shape, or form.

          https://www.nature.com/articles/ni.3069

          In addition to housing an extensive retinue of cells of the adaptive immune system, the lungs have other critical defensive abilities provided by the respiratory epithelial cells. Whitsett and Alenghat describe how the respiratory epithelium juggles its role as the surface of gaseous exchange with its ability to actively combat infectious agents and harmful particulate matter. On its most basic level, the epithelium represents a physical barrier that produces mucus, which entangles and sweeps away damaging agents via the action of the mucus ‘escalator’. However, even surfactant proteins, which are involved mainly in diminishing surface tension, ‘moonlight’ as antimicrobial molecules and are able to opsonise bacteria. The respiratory epithelium is also able to directly sense pathogens and respond via the release of antimicrobial peptides or signal escalation of the immune response through their production of the cytokines TSLP, IL-25 and IL-33. Collectively, these innate processes are usually able to maintain near-sterility of the lungs without the intervention of ‘conventional’ cells of the immune system.

          It’s not necessarily “more dangerous” to breathe pathogens than consume them, the issue with evaporative humidifiers is that they don’t get cleaned as much as they should so the bacteria keep growing and growing and spraying more and more into the air until they overwhelm your immune system and make you sick. By contrast, you eat something bad and it’s one and done and out of your system (usually, assuming it’s not really nasty).