Hi, my evaporative humidifier just broke and it is time for a new one. What I am looking for

  • no cloud/account needed, just local, zigbee, zwave, wifi you name it
  • easy integration with hass
  • easy to clean
  • low maintenance fees (filters and stuff)
  • big rooms 50sqm+ so that it has enough “ooompf” Any ideas highly appreciated
  • rs5thEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    Here’s what I did for humidifiers in my house:

    • Dumb, analog-controlled humidifiers (like with the knobs, no digital displays, buttons, modes, etc)
    • Local control smart plug (Tasmota flashed Sonoff S31 in my case, but it can be anything)
    • Humidity sensor (I use the Zigbee Aqara ones)
    • Create a Generic Hygrostat entity

    Now you’ve got a smart humidifier in Home Assistant. You can set the desired humidity, and when the sensor detects it’s below this, it’ll kick on the smart switch. When it passes the threshold, it’ll turn off. It’s been great! My humidifiers shut off when the water level drops, so I can even use the power monitoring in the Sonoff switch to send me a “low water” alert when the humidifier should be running, but it’s drawing no power!

      • rs5thEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        It’s amazing, I think it still requires YAML config, which is a barrier for some folks. Also a bit annoying that it doesn’t have it’s own dedicated “restart” button like Generic Thermostat, so you have to restart all of HA for the changes to generic_hygrostat to apply.

        • Admiral PatrickEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Well, I didn’t do exactly that. lol. But same setup.

          I made my own humidity sensor with a DHT-11 connected to an ESP-8266 running ESPHome. I’m pretty sure it was automatically detected through the ESPHome integration, so that was one less .yml entry I had to maintain.

          But yeah, the other end of that was just a tasmota-flashed smart plug hooked to a dumb humidifier that I’d top off every day or so.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      This is what I do for my whole-floor dehumidifier in my basement. Simple zwave smart plug and taking a mean of several humidity sensors in the basement to trigger on and off. Also have my home theater down there so I turn if off when a movie is playing as it’s slightly loud when running.

  • JustEnoughDucksEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Remember everyone, clean out your cold humidifiers at least once a month. Otherwise you are literally just spraying mold spores into the air to breathe in. It is linked to respiratory health problems.

    They are great, but need to be well cleaned.

    • @bazingabotOPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      yes, this one is important - does not matter which humidifier you have. I have set a timer in homeassistant to send me regularly a reminder to clean

  • @FauxreignerEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Vornado Evap40 and the zigbee/zwave outlet controller of your choice. It’s classic dumb tech; if you have it switched on but the power is off, it’ll start just fine when you turn the power back on. The top of the central unit just lifts right off for cleaning. And it’s a pure evaporative unit, so if something happens and it fails on, it’s still self regulating.

  • HighsightEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I went through a lot of humidifiers for this exact issue until I landed on this guy. https://a.co/d/d9KsgV5

    It’s not perfect, but it fit nearly all of my needs (which you listed above). It uses Tyua, so it’s not local UNLESS you set it up with LocalTyua like I did. The only major downside is, it beeps every time you have it do something via home assistant. If you’re crafty, you could probably remove the speaker, but I haven’t bothered (yet).

      • deejay4amEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Correct, the water gets vibrated into mist and I like evaporation that will also kick up any minerals in the water. You can filter it but that typically doesn’t solve it completely.