What's up everyone?
So I did a video a little bit ago about four common houseplant myths,
and one of those myths was the idea of misting your houseplants really doing
much of anything for them. Unfortunately, it really doesn't do a whole lot.
It doesn't move the needle on humidity,
which is the reason why people will mist. But you know what does a humidifier,
this bad boy right here.
So in today's video we're going to be talking about humidity and plants in our
indoor jungles as well as actually how to use a humidifier for your plants.
Because really, you know,
I'm sure all these humidifier companies are probably really surprised how many
they're selling because I don't really remember using a humidifier after age
four but now I bought one and this is the TaoTronics Cool Mist Ultrasonic.
We're going to talk about it, but first of all,
I want to talk about what humidity is.
We're going to go all the way down to that level and then why it's important for
plants to exist in certain ranges, why they prefer that.
And we're going to talk about the different types of plant humidifiers.
This is just one.
I have an entire blog post on these that you can check out in the video
description. But this is the one I like for the money. Uh,
there's definitely higher value ones like higher, higher quality,
but they also cost a lot more. So first of all, what is humidity?
At its most simple definition,
it's the amount of water vapor that is held in the air.
Now when we're talking about humidity,
most of the time we talk about relative humidity,
which is the amount of water vapor in the air relative to the maximum amount
that it can hold at a certain temperature.
Now you notice I said temperature there.
The higher the temperature of the air in an environment,
the more water vapor that it can hold.
That's why most of our tropical plants like relatively high temperatures and
relatively high humidity environment that they're used to growing in is able to
hold a decent amount of water vapor in the air.
So to illustrate this a little bit more,
let's talk about two different environments.
You have a desert environment that has a high amount of temperature,
the temp's high there,
but generally the humidity is low because there's actually just not a lot of
water to be in the air.
There's not a lot of water vapor to actually get into the air.
But in an arctic environment you might say, okay, well there's,
it's completely filled with water, but the temperatures are low,
so generally the air can hold less water vapor,
and also the temps are often so low that water is not really able to evaporate
into the air. So humidity is low in both of those environments.
That's why when you see a tropical environment,
you see an environment that is high in temperature but high in water
availability and thus high in humidity.
So then why do some plants need high humidity?
Why do they require something like a humidifier perhaps if we think about it,
if you think about where a tropical plant evolved,
it evolved in a place that was abundant in water.
It was abundant in humidity and temperature, right? And so the response,
the plants that adapt best to that region could be plants that perhaps don't
need to rely so much on their root system or on their succulent leaves to to
hold onto water.
Compare that to let's say a desert where cacti and succulents are prevalent.
Those evolved and adapted - the plants that are sort of left after natural
selection takes care of the,
the stragglers are the ones that can hold on to the most water and so that's why
when we're growing a lot of our tropicals indoors,
we need to provide them with a little bit of extra humidity.
That's what they're used to, right?
That's what they're adapted to and this isn't what they're adapted to.
Not not our little rooms here, even though it is pretty pleasant.
I got my grow lights here, but it's not exactly what they're used to.
Now let's actually go to the humidifier.
There's different types of humidifiers out there and the way they actually get
water vapor into the air is different. Right,
and so you have a warm mist humidifier. This is not one of those is a cool mist.
A warm mist humidifier is evaporative,
so it actually heats the water up until it evaporates into the air and water
vapor then is released from the humidifier. Then you have this one.
This is an ultrasonic or cool mist humidifier.
So this is using vibration to get the water vapor into the air. And the you'll,
you'll know because first of all it'll say it,
but you'll know because the smoke or the vapor that comes out is sort of wispy,
almost looks like one of those fog machines as compared to an evaporative or
warm mist humidifier. The question is, which one should you choose? Well,
the answer is really, it doesn't matter that much.
There are a couple of reasons why you may want to choose one or the other.
So I'll go over those really quickly. So if you're going with a warm mist,
remember it's an evaporative humidifier,
so the water is purified because it's evaporating out into that new form into
gas. And so you don't have to worry so much about, uh, impurities, et cetera.
The downside to a warm mist is that they typically require more energy to heat
up that water to the point at which it evaporates.
So it can be a little bit more energy intensive. On the other hand, a cool mist.
Oftentimes what I like to do,
and we'll get into this is put in purified water so I don't have to worry about
leaving any sort of scale or whatever in here,
but you can also run these for longer periods of time so it makes it kind of
easier to manage overall. Alright, let's go ahead and fill this bad boy up.
So I've got my little Hydroflask with some filtered water.
I ran it through my Berkey water filter, which should remove almost everything,
but you could use a reverse osmosis water if you wanted to or filtered water.
So with this one, the TaoTronics, you just pop this open,
take this little guy off, turn it upside down, unscrew this.
Then you just fill directly from here. It's very, very simple.
This'll hold four liters so you can run this.
What I like about it is it has three different misting modes and you can run it
for up to 36 hours without having to turn it off or refill it.
I'm not filling it all the way to the brim for this video,
but that's pretty long. That's basically a day and a half of time.
So screw it on. And the other thing that's kind of nice about this,
it has a sleep mode.
It actually has an led monitor that tells you the relative humidity that's
currently in the room. So if you know,
let's say a fern wants 60% relative humidity and you have an area where all your
ferns are, then you actually know if it's going to hit that or not,
which is kind of handy, right?
And so the next thing we do is we turn it back upside down screw that in a
little bit more. There we go, boom.
We put this bad boy on top and it's time to plug it in. All right,
let's turn it on.
So the first thing to notice is you can change the misting level. So three,
that's low, medium. And then high. Right.
And another thing that is super nice about this one is the humidistat.
So I can say, you know what, we'll leave it on low for now,
but if if it reaches 65% relative humidity in this room,
then go ahead and stop. And so it'll adjust.
So right now it's actually above, so it's turned off, but if it ever goes below,
it'll then turn on, you can go ahead and have a timer, which is really handy.
And then you can also turn on the nightlight. It's kind of cute.
And then you have your sleep mode as well.
Now when you're deciding where in your houseplant jungle to put your humidifier,
it's really important that you do not put it next to a wall on wood,
you know,
next to anything that a water vapor that condenses would damage.
So don't do that. I like to kind of have,
this would actually be a great place for it is where it is right now.
Unfortunately, that's right in the middle of my room.
So I'm probably not gonna do that. But, um,
another thing that you want to avoid is anything that could block the vent,
cause the air intake is on the bottom.
So you don't want anything that will block it. But really that's about it.
It's not that hard to do.
It's just the fact of understanding why you would do it.
And this is the one I personally like for the value.
There's a couple others on my website that I like for other reasons,
but bang for the buck.
It's hard to go wrong with the TaoTronics Ultrasonic Cool Mist.
So it's pumping out a bunch right now. I hope this was helpful.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.