Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I used to have the rather standard brand 2-gallon unit you can buy on Amazon for half the price of this for two years before it broke. It had a digital "hygrometer" built in and would work quite well. I used this in my guitar studio to protect the instruments. On that unit, a filter lasted an entire season, and the hygrometer worked the same no matter any humidity shifts external to the unit. I thought I was buying a better quality replacement but I was actually buying something that is just twice the price. I absolutely would not recommend this unit for anything other than the extremely uncontrolled humidification of a room just for the simple purpose of humidifying it. The tanks of the side are like big Milk Jugs and one just would not drain when I got it. Vornado did replace it, but I am not reviewing them. I am reviewing the product I spent my money on. The filters last a couple weeks maximum. You can squeeze a bit more out of them by rotating them upside down every few days, but they start to crumble when you do that, and you end up with a swamp of filter pieces in your humidifier. I monitor the humidity levels with 4 calibrated hygrometers on the walls of the room. The "hygrometer" on this unit is my HUGE complaint and the reason it is not suited to maintain humidity for anything of importance. The hygrometer does not have any markings on it, and that would be just fine if it worked like a hygrometer. The point on the hygrometer in which if kicks on/off at a certain humidity level sways WILDLY depending on, from what I can tell, even small humidity shifts externally (outside, in-house, etc.). This completely defeats the purpose of having any sort of control "knob" because it is completely out of control. I have went to bed with the humidity within tolerances and the knob set at 1/4, then woke up with dangerously low humidity levels, the unit not even running, requiring the hygrometer to be turned up to 3/4 just to kick on. Now, you might quickly think this is because it could not keep up with a humidity shift, but that is not he case because the thing is sitting there in the "off" state with very low humidity in the room. Then, a few hours later, it's like a Rain Forest in the room and and I have to manually turn it back down again. I have used evaporative humidifiers for a long time for my guitars, and this thing is not what is needed. There is no way I would recommend this to anyone. Especially at the price.