alt Hacker NewsMan. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
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It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
When I last looked, the evaporative methods were better than others. You don't need distilled water for it, tap will work. They do need cleaning and frequent disinfecting though due to the pad constantly sitting in the water. The prices of replacement pads are a bit expensive but it was cheaper than constantly buying distilled water.
There are a few brands out there but the Philips ones seemed better than the others and the prices were not as insane. I just disliked their marketing and buzzword filled content but otherwise they seem OK. Oh and you should know a lot of their stuff now are internet connected(disabling it will make you lose some functions but otherwise the device still works) and have touch buttons and screens etc. It's unfortunate but this seems to be where every device is heading.
I do agree with you that this seems overly complex. You can pretty much do it yourself if you'd like to take on a project. A fan and a constantly wet rag has the same function but is not as compact.