DIY Humidifier with Ultrasonic Mist Makers - Luthier Tips du Jour Mailbag
In this episode, luthier Robbie O’Brien shows how to manufacture your own humidifier.
Video Transcription
[on-screen text reads: Luthier Tips du Jour Mailbag]
Mailbag question: I'm having trouble with maintaining relative humidity levels in my shop, do you have any suggestions?
Robert O'Brien: Today's Tip du Jour Mailbag question comes to us from Arizona. "Robert, I live in Arizona where it is very dry. I have a few home humidifiers in my shop, but still am having trouble getting proper relative humidity levels in my shop. Can you offer any suggestions? Jordan in Arizona."
Problems with using small home humidifers
Jordan, I feel your pain. I live in Colorado. It's also very dry. Now, if you have a larger shop, you have to have several of those small home humidifiers around the shop, probably three or four of them. And there are a couple issues with that. First of all, it gets quite expensive changing out those filters every few months, keeping it clean. Also, the tanks on those things are fairly small, and you have to babysit those machines. If not, they go dry, and they keep running, and the relative humidity drops very quickly. And that's almost worse than not having anything at all in your shop to help keep the RH levels up.
Now, recently I was in Fort Collins, Colorado visiting a fellow Luthier and friend, Michael Baskin of Bashkin Guitars. He actually solved his problem by making his own humidifier. Now, I know what you're thinking, "is that even possible? Can you make your own humidifier?" Well, yes you can. I've ordered all the parts. I'm going to do it now. Let me show you how. Perhaps this will solve your problem.
How to make your own shop humidifer
I started by getting a four-inch fan to blow the exhaust with humidity out into the environment. I also have an electronic hygrometer that I can plug the fan into. It's got an electronic sensor that can string across the room away from my humidifier. That helps dial in the correct humidity. I've got the mist maker here. This is an ultrasonic mist maker. I got the 12 disc unit. It comes with smaller ones, one, two, three, four, five, smaller discs depending on the size of the room you have. He also sends you some extra discs in case those go bad. And these are set at the 3 to 5,000 hour life span. So it's got quite a long life span in them, and you get an extra set just in case. Transformer to run the ultrasonic mist maker. Power supplies for all the other things. Also, a float in your mist maker will go inside that and will float in your reservoir.
Select the right reservoir for your shops size
Now let me show you the reservoir I got. Jordan, here's my reservoir. It's just a tub from my local big box store. It's 27 gallons. I think that ought to do the job. You can also go with smaller ones if you want to do that. If your shop is not quite as large as mine is, go with the smaller ultrasonic disc mist maker. Get you, perhaps, a three or five size and a smaller reservoir. I'm going with 27 gallon and the big 12 disc ultrasonic mist maker. So let's put this thing together.
Mount the fan
So in the top of the container here, I need to drill a hole and mount the fan. The fan is what's going to blow the mist out of the container and into the environment. So I need to drill a hole. I've got a four-inch fan. That's what came with my unit, so I'm going to use a hole cutting saw to do it. I guess you could use a knife or something else, but this just seems a lot more practical.
[Robert drills a 4 inch hole in the top corner of the lid]
Now that my hole is drilled, I'm going to put a little bit of silicone around here to help make a good seal so I get a little bit more efficiency out of the fan [Robert applies silicone all the way around the edge of the hole]. Now, my silicone is going on white, but it will dry clear. And you want your fan oriented in such a way that it's going to be pulling the air down into the container and not out of it. And the silicone's probably enough to hold it, but if you want to put a screw or two in there, you can. Next, you want to wire the fan, and you can just go ahead and connect it like this with some wire nuts or use the supplied connectors that came with it. I chose just to use the wire nuts, and it's probably not a bad idea. Go ahead and plug it in, and make sure everything's wired properly. It is working. It's pulling air down into the container and not sucking it back out.
Drill exhaust hole and install mist maker
The next thing I'm going to do is drill a couple of holes on this end [Robert points to the top of the lid on the opposite side of the fan] so that the exhaust or the mist has a way to escape when it's forced out by the fan on the other end. Now, I am using a garden hose hooked up to my sink, and I'm putting water inside the tub here. That should be enough to get us going. Next, take the float, and put the ultrasonic mist maker down inside the float here. Place it into your tub. Then take the lid to the tub, place it over the top. I'm just going to feed the wire out through one of these holes that I drilled here.
So I've plugged my ultrasonic mist maker, which is inside the tub, into my transformer. Now, let's turn the fan on and see what happens. That, my friends, is a humidifier. It's putting out lots of humidity.
Connect and configure the humidistat
So the next step is to plug everything into my humidistat here, my hygrometer, program it so I have my lower and higher boundaries, my parameters set at the relative humidity levels I want to maintain here in my shop. So I've taken a few minutes and program my humidistat, and I've got it all set up and ready to go.
Adjustable vent ducts
I have made some changes to my setup, and let me show you some of these changes. The first one is fairly obvious. It's this right here [Robert grabs each of the adjustable exhaust ducts]. I've put these adjustable ducts in here so that I can direct where the flow of humidity is going. I can take it straight up, I can put it out right or left or straight out, whatever you want to do. So this is a pretty practical thing to do. Just drilled a couple holes there, enlarged them, and then stuck those in there. Your transformer could just sit right on top of your unit here.
Humidistat adaptations and sensor placement
Here's another change I've made. The humidistat, I adapted it so that I could plug in my transformer that goes to the mist maker and also my fan. So that way, your mist maker is not running all the time. Just put yourself an adapter in here, and then plug in both of these. And it looks like the amps on this will handle the amps on the other two pieces. So I think that's going to work out real well for me. I don't have to listen to that mist maker going all the time. Also, your sensor, you want this sensor as far away from your unit as possible. You don't want it right in front of this collecting all the humidity. Get it as far away as possible, that way you get a little better reading throughout the shop.
Add float shutoff valve to automate water reservoir filling
I've also made another change inside the unit, and let me show you that. So in order to not have to fill this thing up all the time, I've added this float shutoff valve here. I just drilled the hole inside of my container. Right now, I've got it hooked up with a garden hose, which doesn't work real well under pressure. I'm going to go swap this out for an actual washer hookup line. Those are made to work under pressure. And as the water level comes up, then this shuts itself off. I've got that hooked onto the plumbing of my sink here in the shop, and I don't have to worry about filling this thing. I can go away and travel for a few weeks, and this thing should take care of itself.
So Jordan in Arizona, thank you very much for your question. Go ahead and give it a shot. Try building your own humidifier. I think it's going to solve your problem. At the very least, you're going to have a very cool fog machine for Halloween, and happy building.
[on-screen text reads: More Luthier Tips and online courses available at www.obrienguitars.com. Private and small group guitar building and finishing instruction available.]
