In the winter, I need a small humidifier in my bedroom – and the rest the house for that matter. I’m one of those people that’s really sensitive to dry air. The problem rears its ugly head most when I’m traveling. I’ll fall asleep on a hotel bed and wake up with my skin cracking and my sinuses clogged up. It’s miserable. So I went looking for the best travel humidifier.
Recently, I was on a cruise through Norway, during the cold parts of the year. It was an amazing trip, but I am SO glad that I brought an Olympic swimming pool worth of moisturizer. The cabins were so dry that the ship nurse advised me to wet a towel and hang it in our room to help humidify it.
Could the SmartDevil be one of the best travel humidifiers? I loved it’s compact and efficient design.
The towel wasn’t a bad idea, and it did help a bit, but it didn’t move the needle significantly. That room was still painfully dry. We even took to standing in the artic air on deck to get a little moisture in our lungs. That got cold fast.
I loved the trip and wanted to go back immediately (yes, I’m an annoying “I love snow!” person). But if I went back, I knew that I needed more than a towel to keep me from suffering. I figured that there had to be a travel humidifier. How could we have a thing called a Cybertruck and not have portable humidifiers?
Slim pickings
When I started looking for the best travel humidifier, it looked glum. While we have small humidifiers, some very small, most of them appear to be crap. I found some neat concepts that could be stuck right into a glass of water and were battery powered. Howeverm the reviews were strongly negative on all of them. Indeed, most of the available products were cheap looking, made by companies that sold a mish-mash of unrelated goods, which is never a good sign.
The good news is that I was able to find three products that seemed strong. They had strong customer reviews and were made by companies in the business of making home products.
The Homedics Portable Humidifier
The SmartDevil Small Humidifier
The Pure Enrichment PureSpa XL
From left, the SmartDevil, the Homedics, and the Pure Enrichment.
Breakdown, Specs, and Initial Thoughts
On paper, these products present some interesting differences
The Pure Enrichment PureSpa is much larger in capacity and size than the other two and should be able to humidify a room more effectively. The downside is that it’s not exactly luggage friendly, but it’s still feasible to fit it in a carry-on. Right out of the box it feels very nice and looks well made. Turning it on reveals an ambient light that’s nicer than I expected. Frankly I didn’t think I would care about it at all, but it’s pretty enough that it adds to the overall value.
The SmartDevil is quite compact and easy to pack in any luggage, but with the smaller size comes no claims about coverage. It too has a light as part of its features, although it doesn’t change color like the PureSpa. But if you like having a small light to guide you in a dark room, then it’s perfect. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that the SmartDevil feels sturdy. Yes, a hard fall onto tile or cement floors would likely crack it, but I think this thing can take few hits.
Meanwhile, the Homedics is even smaller than the SmartDevil, capable of fitting in a cupholder. It’s also battery powered, unlike the SmartDevil, so the Homedics is the ultimate in portability. While its coverage and humidifying power is likely to be the weakest, that portability gives it an edge that the others don’t have. The battery also allows it to be put in places that don’t have easy access to an outlet. That might not seem like a concern, but if you’re a frequent traveler, you know how often hotel rooms or cruise cabins don’t have convenient power outlets.
It’s not all rosy with these three though, they each have their problems. Both the Homedics and the SmartDevil come with USB-C cords included, but not a wall connection. I would like to say that’s surprising, but these days including necessary components is not a given. To use either you’ll have to provide USB power, meaning bringing a separate charger or USB hub –like this. Although both included cables were of decent quality, they weren’t very long. I’d recommend that you purchase a 6ft / 2m long USB-C cable – I’ve got several and they are a worthy investment. Here’s the exact one I use. Like I said earlier, because of the battery, having a long USB cable is less of a problem with the Homedics. It’s still a downside with the SmartDevil though.
Another issue with both the SmartDevil and Homedics is that their size necessitates a wick style water basin. This means that a cotton wick draws water up from a basin into the aerosolizing chamber. These wicks will need to be changed from time to time and it is an ongoing cost. That mechanic also means that there are internal components exposed to water that will be impossible to clean without breaking the device apart. In my experience with humidifiers, you need to clean things out and this design makes it very hard to do.
When looking for the best travel humidifier, I didn’t love these cotton wicks but I also didn’t have much choice.
You could likely disinfect the device by running a dilution of white vinegar through it while it’s running, but I couldn’t find that recommended by the manufacturer. It will make everything smell like vinegar though, so only do so when prepared. To be clear, there are other cleaning instructions that recommend vinegar, just not this specific use.
Similar cleaning concerns also come up with the PureSpa, this time with the tank. I’ve owned several different ultrasonic basin humidifiers. One of the things that is essential to do with these is disinfect the tank and basin. Doing so with the basin is easy, but the tank is much harder. The fill cap for the tank is the size of a quarter, which means manually cleaning it and rinsing the disinfectant out is very difficult. Not impossible, but a pain. I’m sure that they could have fitted a larger fill cap to this if they wanted.
The offset hole is the fill hole. It’s small size makes it hard to clean.
Testing
To find which one is the best travel humidifier, we’re going to be running each of these through two sets of tests. We will be using the same room in each test, a bedroom that’s near 150 sq. ft. We will run the humidifier in the room over a period of 4 hours and monitor the change in humidity over that time.
In between each test we will allow the room to return to a baseline humidity level and temperature as before. This will vary between each test as the ambient humidity and temperature changes, but we will do our best to keep it close.
We will also run a test with the humidifiers very close, within 2 ft. of the hygrometer (that’s the device that measures humidity). This is because both the SmartDevil and Homedics show multiple examples of the humidifier being used that close to the user, which implies that is how they intend it to be used. We will use a 2 hr. run time for this test.
I didn’t expect one of the best travel humidifiers to also be so RGB.
Results
After running all the tests, here are the results.
The Pure Enrichment outperforming the others in the whole room test is not surprising at all. It is multiples times larger in capacity than the other two and it is intended to be used for humidifying a small room. Nor is it a shock that the smaller two options would struggle to move the humidity very much in the room. They did move it up, but I think that in a room this size they struggle to make much of an improvement. Perhaps in a smaller room they would be able to do more.
Conclusions
The Pure Enrichment is the only device in my tests that had a significant impact on humidity, increasing it by 5% over 4 hours. The Homedics moved the needle by 2% over 4 hours which, considering its size, is rather impressive. Yet, that increase wasn’t replicated in the 2ft test, where it didn’t change humidity at all, so that shift in the 4 hr. test could have been down to environmental factors. Of course, the same could be said for the 2ft test results.
I’d hoped that one of the smaller units would make a more noticeable bump than they did, but they still showed some promise. The SmartDevil may not have changed humidity much, but it did push it up each time. And, although the Homedics had mixed test results, it still managed a positive shift in humidity.
Still, there’s no arguing that if you really need to guarantee humidity, then get yourself a Pure Enrichment.
The major downside here is its size. Yes, it will fit in a carry-on roller-bag and that was something I was surprised to find. I looked, unsuccessfully, for hours for another comparable humidifier, in terms of tank volume, that would also fit in a roller-bag. I found similar volume humidifiers, but their dimensions always made fitting them into the bag a challenge to say the least. Sure, you might get a weird look from security when they see it’s a humidifier, but your sinuses will thank you.
If you don’t want to carry something that large, and I don’t blame you there, then either of the smaller devices should at least improve the humidity. I can’t say that either the Homedics or SmartDevil blew me away with their performance, but their size and portability were fantastic. I used to drive for hours at a time in the winter, hundreds, sometime thousands of miles each week for an old job. The Homedics, I believe, could have made those drives more comfortable. Its battery powered and fits in a cupholder, and that’s something I didn’t see anything else capable of.
Best Overall
The Pure Enrichment PureSpa takes home the medal here for best travel humidifier. It combines a large tank capacity, serious humidifying power, and the capability to fit inside carry-on luggage in one device. Yes, it is much larger than the other two and will take up a lot of space in the aforementioned luggage. However, I’ve traveled a lot in winter and been so terribly miserable from dry air that this is a tradeoff I’m willing to make.
This one is going in my bags on any trip longer than an overnight in winter.
Most Portable
If portability is your absolute top qualifier for what makes the best travel humidifier, there’s no question – get the Homedics. You simply can’t beat the battery and the fact that it fits in a cup holder. I still have some concerns with long term use and keeping it clean, but I can see solutions to that. I would not use this as an every day humidifying solution, but it does make a compelling offer for a travel solution.
Best Compromise
The SmartDevil is a surprisingly potent device. After my testing was complete, a family member asked me if they could use this as a bedside humidifier. I said sure and they’ve been quite happy with it since. The tank capacity makes a big difference over the Homedics for a long term humidifying use. With near double the capacity, you don’t need to fill it as often and that means more time to do other things before refilling.
