Having someone I respect validate a choice I’ve made always gives me a warm feeling inside. In a recent post, Marco Arment discusses and recommends humidifiers. The upshot is that evaporative humidifiers work best, but I wanted throw my four cents in.

First, steam humidifers are pretty dangerous around small children. The last thing I want is an inviting vat of hot water falling off the dresser and boiling my girls. Of course I can only find perfectly safe (though not very effective) ultrasonic Hello Kitty humidifers on the web, so it’s not a huge crisis.

Second, we have a Honeywell HCM-630 3 gallon cool moisture humidifier in our bedroom. It’s now $60 on Amazon, but it was $30 when we bought it 4 years ago. We end up refilling it almost every day and it does a pretty good job on a relatively small room with the door open. But the air coming out is cold enough that we have to be careful that it doesn’t blow too close to the baby’s sleep area.

Third, we don’t use the liquid additive that Marco recommends, but we do use these cleaning cartridges. They definitely work, but I bet Marco’s solution ends up being cheaper.

Finally, it’s really important to run the thing every day or the filter dries out and gets very gross very fast.