Humidifier Improvement

This project is an improvement concept for a typical evaporative home humidifier. I have noticed that my wicking media only saturates about halfway up with water. This effect gets worse as the filter ages and leads to even lower and lower saturation level (and corresponding moisture output). By pumping water to the top of the media I think I can realize much higher efficiency out of the machine. I've verified this by manually pouring water over the top of a new filter to saturate the entire surface area. The humidity level spikes in the hours afterward until the effect is gradually lost as the water level drops.

Evaporative humidifier

Mini water pump (like a micro aquarium pump)

Tubing

Water sensor (if not wiring into an existing sensor)

The basin of my machine has a portion of the reservoir with room to place the small pump. Different humidifier models have different size and shape bases, so you will need to source a pump and a location that suits your machine.

I'll source a small pump on Amazon for less than $10. It does not need to be powerful, just enough to get water to the top of the wick media so it can trickle down, that is really the only specification for the pump. Extra flow is not detrimental either as it will simply return to the basin to be recirculated. The pump you source will drive the nozzle design, (bigger pump = more nozzle area) but those exact flow dynamics are beyond the scope of this writer and this project! I just created a simple slotted concept in SolidWorks as shown in the next step.

The wicking media of my humidifier has a cylindrical shape of roughly 9" diameter, so my nozzle design will need to be ring shaped and slim enough to fit above the wick, between it and the fan baffle. The wick is made of a cotton like material so the dimensions here are not critical, still though the slimmer the better so as not to create too much "squish" into the media.

My 3D printer has a small bed so I needed to print multiple sections and connect them together, matching the curvature of the wick. The prints shown are more of a proof of that concept, they do not have a large enough curvature to fit my machine.

The installation of the pump and nozzle will be fairly straightforward. The pump I sourced runs on 110 V and the humidifier has an built-in float switch that shuts off the fan when the basin runs out of water. I'll piggyback off this switch, wiring it in series with my pump to shut it off as well when the water level gets too low.

This step will depend on your exact humidifier model. At a minimum you'll want to verify the pump works and is supplying enough water flow to saturate the upper half of the wick media. With access to the components it's a good time to also verify the low water shutoff cuts power to the pump at the appropriate time.

You should start to see better performance out of the humidifier with the system at work. In my experimenting I noticed faster rise of humidity level and higher water consumption. Both of these are good metrics to verify the performance increase of a humidifier.