Doug,

There are many things to consider when working on boosting humidity. Unless
the room is sealed off from the rest of the house, anything you do will be
attempting to humidify the whole house.

If we assume that the room IS sealed off, and has an 8' ceiling, the volume
of the room is 480 cubic feet. At 80°F, 100% RH occurs when there is about
250 ml of water in the air. If we assume your whole house is about 1600
square feet of floorspace, that's a volume of 12,800 cubic feet, meaning
that the 100% RH level needs almost 6.6 liters of water! If we drop that
back to 65% RH, it still means that there must be 4.3 liters of water in the
air.

Knowing full well that your house is not likely to be totally sealed, you've
got to figure on moisture escaping to the outside, meaning that you have to
keep adding it. (I sure wish there was a way to know what that rate was...)

Anyway, you're better off with something with a large capacity, and
connecting it to a humidistat, rather than getting something small and
hoping it is enough.

As an example, in a friend's greenhouse - about 2000 cubic feet and tight
except for around the door - there is a 2 gph fogger, and in the really
cold, dry days lately, it works full time to maintain 70% humidity. At
70°F, that volume only holds 0.2 gallons of water, so he's losing 10x that
in an hour!

By the way, I put a moisture-capacity calculator on my website if you want
to play around:
http://www.firstrays.com/moistcalc.htm

--

Ray Barkalow - First Rays Orchids - www.firstrays.com
Plants, Supplies, Books, Artwork, and Lots of Free Info!

.. . . . . . . . . . .
"Doug Bolton" wrote in message
...
I'm interested in this as I've found home humidifiers to be problematic.
I'm growing in an upstairs 6x10 foot room using a ceiling fan and 2
oscillating
tabletop fans on the floor. Also a ceramic heater in the winter to
maintain a
daytime 79/81°F temp.

I've found the cool mist wicks dry out too fast and end up doing no
wiking.

The warm mist ones are better but I think add to the heat problem (has got
to
95+, I think the Coryanthes like that but others don't) in the summer and
deteriorate as they're only made to be on a couple of hours a day and not
12.
As I've got the windows open in the summer and dry heat in the winter I
really
need to humidify in both those seasons. Less so in the spring and fall as
ambient temps with the hid on are kinder.

So I've considered this solution. Would use their (mainlandmart) 5 mister
unit
in a tub with the floatation device to maintain water depth over the
mister.
This one's suppose to do .5 litre per hour. This isn't a lot. The other 5
mister
unit at 1.5 may be too much. I was wondering if the mist would make it out
of
the tub as the water level sank. Perhaps the ceiling fan would blow it
out. Also
really don't need pooling water indoors. Hoping the fans would help with
this
too. It is quite breezy in there.

Doug Bolton

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 13:52:37 -0700, "molli"
wrote:

I wound up going back to my cool mist humidifier. All the fogger did was
make a puddle under the bowl! I didnt' notice it raised the humidity that
much, unless it was in the fishtank with my masds..wich interestingly
enough
kept them too wet and they all died....I'm no expert here mind you, but
that's the experience I had with it. IF you want to fiddle with one..try
mainlandmart.com they have foggers for $25 you supply the bowl.