A Story of Two Humidifiers

This is the true story of two humidifiers. It takes place over a period of four days.

Background

I live in a top-floor apartment of an old building. Over three years I have managed to change the way people think about stuff they no longer want. Last Thursday morning, to my great delight, the men from "Canadian Food for Children" ( www.canadianfoodforchildren.ca ) arrived with a cube van to take two elevator car loads of reusable clothing and household goods. At last I can sleep lying down.

While we load the van, a lady pushes a humidifier to the garbage area. “Stop!” Yells I, “Does it still work?”. She doesn’t know, she knows only that nowadays you can get a compact model. I can’t bear to see this, but I have other work to do, so I limit myself to wrenching the water reservoir from the cabinet - to use as a vermicomposter bin.

Saturday afternoon I notice that this first humidifier has been joined by a second humidifier. I can’t let both of these slip by, so this Monday morning I dragged the second humidifier upstairs and began to demolish it. What follows is a step-by-step discovery.

Basics

First off, it’s “A Second Use For Everything”, it’s not “Never throw anything away”, so there will be material to toss into the garbage bins. Be prepared for that.

I armed myself with a plastic shopping bag (a second use for that!), a pair of pliers and a screwdriver.

To Work

The plastic water container, about five gallon capacity, has already been pressed into service as an over-winter bin. I run three tower composters in series – two on the balcony, the third and final stage indoors. We’re getting close to frost-time, so I usually load the tower contents into bins and let the worms slowly eat away over winter indoors. Come spring, with one of the towers prepped with winter’s scraps, I’ll harvest worms and prime the outside towers.

The three or four baffles, plastic plates about four inches square, that used to direct the air-flow, are set to one side. They will be drainage stands. My houseplants sit each in a 4-gallon ice-cream pail. Each plate will sit in a pail, and the house plant will sit atop the baffle plate, for excellent drainage of surplus water.

Remove the two control knobs and set them aside for later installation on the motor. Snip the float ball from the cable attached to the cut-off switch. I haven’t found a use for this yet!

Remove the drive bands. They will probably be perished and unusable, a primary cause of trashing an otherwise perfectly good humidifier.

Extract the two-foot diameter plastic drum that rotates within the humidifier. The back of it, a solid disk of plastic, is just what we need for our phonograph turntable separator. (We wanted a disk of greater diameter than the turntable, to facilitate the separation of worms from castings by centrifugal force.)

Remove the self-tapping screws that hold the fan and motor case to the cabinet. This will result in your having two major structures: (1) a cabinet, in fake wood grain, and (2) a fan and motor mounted in a galvanized steel frame. Leave the fan and motor in its steel frame.

Remove the plastic pulley-wheels and their spindles. I haven’t found a second use for these, yet, but I’m contemplating building myself a rather nice pulley-block by which I can raise and lower large houseplants for watering.

MAINS ELECTRICITY! Exercise caution. I have a healthy fear of mains juice after receiving a couple of shocks from the Australian 240v system. I use an extension cord and place myself a safe distance from the mechanical aspects, and then plug-in using the cord. If the motor starts to turn, I unplug. Good, it works!

I mounted the entire fan and motor frame in my living-room window and left it running at low speed. Does it work? I’m boiling down yesterday’s turkey, and the kitchen temperature has dropped 18F in an hour, because I’m pumping cool outside air directly into my living area. Fantastic. The motor runs so quietly I can hardly hear it, and there is the faintest breeze reaching to my favorite TV chair.

Top-floor apartments in this building are notorious. We leave our balcony doors open all winter in an effort to get the temperature to drop below about 78F. This winter I’ll be pumping chilled air without the risk of my lovely ginger cat straying onto the balcony. Hooray!

About ten self-tapping screws hold the wheeled base to the cabinet. Unscrew and discard the screws. The wheeled base makes a just-the-right-size trolley for the composter bin or, if you prefer, a rather nifty base for trucking houseplants into the sunlight during winter time. Heh heh!

You now have a fine cabinet, wood-grain, good condition. What to do with it? Well, it just so happens that one of the cupboards at church, used for storage of books, cans of coffee, plastic forks, etc. is a mess, so a couple of scraps of timber screwed in the inside of the cabinet will make a near-perfect slide-in insert for the cupboard, and a good deal less mess there. And THAT means less wastage, and that has to be good.

Did I mention there were TWO humidifiers? Repeat steps 1 through 12 above and have a happy time!

It works!

It really does. I spent less than one hour per humidifier.

I have a window fan for my bedroom and a window fan for the living-room.

I have two trolleys, two vermicomposter bins, and the local church (school etc) will love me too!

My centrifugal worm separator is improved.

Thanks for reading this. I hope that you are inspired.

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