Timeline for How can I humidify a room without a humidifier?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 25, 2016 at 16:38 | comment | added | T.E.D. | Honestly, I'm much more worried about what happens to my floors when someone trips over that bucket. Soaked carpet or floorboards would certainly act to humidify the room nicely, but I don't think that's a desirable solution. | |
| Jan 25, 2016 at 2:26 | comment | added | busukxuan | So many people misunderstanding here... The salt solution would only absorb humidity if the air is moist. A "dry" room's H2O partial pressure is lower than the equilibrium vapor pressure of the solution. Kudos to @Kris for this smart solution, but I might still use pure water, that is just enough even in such a damp country in Malaysia. | |
| Jan 25, 2016 at 1:18 | comment | added | Kris | Thanks for the replies. This is the method we use for calibrating humidity probes, and occurs at quite a small scale. Adding humidity takes much longer than removing it (using lithium chloride). However as a passive system it's quiet and will maintain itself for many years. | |
| Jan 24, 2016 at 12:42 | comment | added | Praxiteles | Is @kris suggesting this approach perhaps because the salt solution helps prevent over humidification? (i.e. The saturated salt solution will allow humidity to climb to 75% and try to prevent it from climbing above that vs. pure water which will equilibrate higher with a theoretical max at 100% - recognizing that both will yield lower humidification due to new dry air.) | |
| Jan 23, 2016 at 5:14 | comment | added | N. Virgo | Physicist here. Joined LH to upvote @DavePeterschmidt's comment: this is a dehumidifier. The salt wants to be more hydrated than it is, so it will try to suck water out of the air. If the air is dry it will fail to do so and put moisture into the air instead (eventually resulting in ~75% humidity as the answer says) but it will do so slower and less effectively than if you just put water in the bucket without salt. (That would eventually result in 100% humidity, though of course that won't really happen, since new dry air will leak in to the room.) | |
| Jan 22, 2016 at 19:38 | comment | added | David Richerby | "Dump a large amount of salt into the bucket, and add water until the salt will absorb no more water." That doesn't make sense. There's a limit to how much salt a bucket of water can absorb, and that creates a saturated solution. But any given amount of salt can be absorbed into an unbounded amount of water: you can just keep adding water to it. | |
| Jan 22, 2016 at 10:55 | comment | added | TafT | @DavePeterschmidt is there not a point in the concentration of the solution when the partial pressures equalize? Does this mean that oceans dry the air (or would do if the evaporative forces of sun and wind were not present)? | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 18:57 | comment | added | user11930 | Just wanted to mention to NOT use the saturated salt method mentioned above. That will DEhumidify the room, not humidity it, as the original poster requested. The partial pressure of the water molecules in the air will be greater than the partial pressure of the water generated by the salt solution, so the saturated salt solution will take in airborne water, not give it out. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 14:45 | comment | added | spacetyper | Just to nitpick--you could add as much water as you want to a bucket full of salt (assuming the bucket is big enough). To reliably saturate, you add the water, and THEN add the salt, and keep stirring and adding salt until the salt ceases to dissolve. | |
| Jan 21, 2016 at 13:50 | comment | added | Free Consulting | Joining LH to say what: Saturated salt solution is the only smart way to do as OP asked. Inventing anything that is more complex than primitive humidifier (see the water container on the radiator) is little weird. | |
| Jan 20, 2016 at 23:14 | review | First posts | |||
| Jan 21, 2016 at 8:13 | |||||
| Jan 20, 2016 at 23:13 | history | answered | Kris | CC BY-SA 3.0 |