Ever wake up at three in the morning wondering why your mouth feels like the Sahara Desert? That used to happen to me several nights a week until I finally realized that my bedroom air was severely lacking in humidity. My apartment’s heating system is extremely inefficient, so when winter rolls around my radiators pump so much hot air into my apartment that it basically becomes a desert.
I had been researching humidifiers for the better part of a year. There were so many options that looked intimidating. Large tank humidifiers that seemed more like complicated science kits than household appliances, high-tech options with buttons I didn’t understand, and ultrasonic ones that made claims about producing “spa-like” mists.
I needed something small and quiet that wouldn’t take over my nightstand. After months of obsessing over reviews and hardcore debating with myself if I really needed a humidifier, I decided to take the plunge and got this: PureEnrichment MistAire Ultra Portable Ultrasonic Humidifier.
It’s about the size of a large soda can.
There aren’t any bells or whistles. It’s simply a white cylinder with a water tank directly on top that holds approximately 300ml of water. It was $45 when I bought mine, but I’ve seen it as low as $25.
The first thing I noticed about this humidifier is that it’s incredibly quiet. Like, whisper quiet. My fan makes more noise and my fan barely makes any noise at all.
You won’t hear this running at night. The LED lights can also be turned off completely, which was a huge selling point for me since I hate having little LEDs visible when I’m trying to sleep. Using it is stupid easy.
Fill the water tank up with water, plug it in, press the power button. It’ll run for up to eight hours on a full tank. I plug it in right before bed and unplug it in the morning.
The humidistat is adjustable so you can control how much mist you want to put out. For my small bedroom, I keep it on the lowest setting. My room is only about ten feet by twelve feet and I didn’t want to be swimming around in steam every night.
I was really surprised at how quickly I noticed a difference. I don’t know if it was two days or three, but within just a few nights I stopped waking up with that dry-mouth feeling in the middle of the night. My sinuses also felt clearer throughout the morning and I stopped waking up mouth-breathing, something my boyfriend says I do whenever my nasal passages become too dry.
The biggest surprise was how my skin felt. My lips and nose usually feel tight and sometimes even flaky in the mornings if my room is dry. Ever since using the humidifier, that hasn’t happened.
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I can’t speak to how well it regulates the humidity in my room since I don’t have a hygrometer but I can definitely tell that my room isn’t dry anymore. Before using it, it felt like my lungs would automatically suction up every speck of dust in the room just trying to draw in moisture when I breathed. Now my room just feels comfortable.
As far as cleaning goes, I’m not terribly diligent. If something has a complicated cleaning process, I usually avoid it. Fortunately for me, this baby is super easy to clean.
All you have to do is empty out the water tank and refill it with water daily. I use filtered water since we have extremely hard water where I live and I didn’t want to deal with the mineral build up, but distilled water would work just fine. Every week or so I like to dump out the tank, clean it with white vinegar, and let it sit for about 30 minutes to kill any bacteria and prevent mineral build up.
The unit itself is also very easy to clean since there aren’t any needles or hidden cracks and crevices to worry about. It breaks apart into two pieces: the base unit and the water tank. I recently started using distilled water instead of filtered because I got paranoid about leaving up white vinegar-like circles from mineral deposits.
Distilled water is more expensive than buying a filter but I go through so little that a gallon lasts me almost two weeks. I’d say that my operating cost is probably an extra pound a month, give or take. Size-wise, I’m really happy with this humidifier.
It’s small enough that it doesn’t take up too much room on my nightstand, but it’s big enough that it doesn’t get lost amongst everything else either. It currently lives between my lamp and my phone charger but I’ve moved it around plenty when I needed to dust or rearrange my room. Since it’s so small I can even take it with me when I stay at friends’ houses.
Just unplug it, toss it in a weekend bag, and go!
Notes: Like many of these types of humidifiers, I made the mistake my first few times of using it by running it on the highest setting. The humidity definitely increased, but so much that my blankets and sheets became damp and I woke up feeling like I was in a bathroom that just ended a really long shower.
Find a happy medium and adjust your settings accordingly. I usually use the timer and set it for six hours, which works out perfectly for me since it usually turns itself off sometime in the early morning hours. That way I don’t run it all day when I don’t need it and there’s no chance of me forgetting to turn it off and over humidifying my room.
TLDR: Would I recommend this product? Yes. Would I purchase this item again?
Yes. It was everything I was looking for and more. Sometimes you really can’t beat the simple stuff.
