Sounds good, should work, but doesn't. Any water that evaporates from the surface of the water doesn't hang around in a little cloud, it rapidly diffuses into the atmosphere of your house.

There is lots of good stuff in the past long thread in the link.

Here is a link that might be useful: Indoor growing stuff

If we accept for simplicity's sake that there are four main variables of orchid culture they would be: light, watering, humidity, fertilization. Light is the most important of all so I list it first. Light controls watering frequency and that goes second. Humidity also has an effect on watering frequency and in low humidity orchids lose water at a more rapid rate but in low light (which your orchids are in) orchids lose water at a very low rate. It evens out. In low light you want the humidity (and watering frequency) to be on the low side. To do something positive about the humidity without also taking care of the light will invite issues of rot.

The dendrobium is actually the orchid that should be in the south window and the Mtssa the east. But. There was an excellent chart posted within the last 24 hours showing how light diminishes from a possible maximum of 10,000 footcandles (usually only possible at noon at tropical atolls in unspoiled South Sea air). On a kitchen table some distance from the actual glass pane I can only imagine the dend is getting less than 2000fc and only between 9:00am and noonish. For the rest of the day it is getting less than 500fc. It is slowly dying. In the bathroom things are hardly better for the glass is heavily frosted and windows are usually small. Orchids are not decorative accents the way I grow them and that is not the way I recommend you try and grow them. Your efforts to provide them with humidity show a willingness to elevate their status beyond objets d'art but IMO directing your efforts at humidity is to waste energy on a cultural parameter of much less importance than the main one: light.

In your zone unless you are in the arid north Southwest, humidity shouldn't be the biggest concern at this time of year. Indoors with A/C it might be but saucers filled with water are just not the way to go about trying to change the relative humidity of several hundred cubic feet of air mass. Properly sized room humidifiers put several pounds of water into the air per 24 hours and this just suffices in most cases to stay on top of a reasonable RH (relative humidity). A proper humidifier is the only real option for humidity modification. There are all types of humidifiers. Vaporizers count as humidifiers, very effective ones. Cool mist, warm mist, Sierra Mist(tm), ultrasonic, makes you thirsty. Pricey too, most of them but they are doing what passive methods cannot accomplish. The changing of the state of the water molecules in the tank or saucer into water vapor. It takes a lot of energy to do this and room temperature air has absolutely zero ability to move more than a small amount of molecules of water vapor into the air per hour.

H

any increase in humidity will help. everything that i have growing in my solarium are on humidity trays. i use seedling trays the ones with no holes in them. put in the seedling insert and this is strong enough to hold the pots. when the plants are watered the water flows thru and stay in the tray. last winter i was curious to see if the trya really helped. it was a very sunny day and the temp in the room was 74F, the humidity in the room was 52%. i took the humidstat and layed it across the tray the humidity jumped up to 68% then i took the humidstat and layed it across the top of the pot. the humidty was 65%. then i took the humidstat and layed it in the leaves of the plant. the reading was 62%. nothing that exciting but it did increase the humidity and did not take any enery to do it.

I agree with Howard. Raising the humidity will do little for your plants without proper light. Your Den needs tons of light and your Mtssa needs to be next to the east window.

My orchids survive extremely dry conditions during winter in my house. High ceiling and open rooms make it impossible to humidify the area. My moisture levels run around 20% in January. But my plants get lots of light. They grow and flower.

Concentrate on light and your plants will prosper.

Jane

Yes, I have to agree with Howard and Jane on all counts. Jane sums it up with her closing "Concentrate on light and your plants will prosper". Your plants will decline steadily without enough light.

You have to provide a lot more light than you think you do. The mistake all newbies (including me) seem to make is to take all that "bright shade" talk in the culture sheets and books literally and totally misapply it. Growing directions should definitely be re-written so they are more informative for people trying to grow in a home rather than a greenhouse.

"Bright shade" in a greenhouse is a great deal brighter than the interior of a "bright" room in a house. For one thing, a house cuts off *all* the overhead light. Even skylights give overhead light only to a limited area. In a "bright shade" greenhouse, there is overhead light, but cut to maybe 35% with shade cloth or paint. Big, big difference between 35% overhead light and 0.

I have to share my little story. After five+ years of running a fogger in my orchid room (aka) kitchen) which I was convinced my HID-lit orchids would perish without and having nightmares about what would happen if it broke down, I finally got sick of the constant maintenance, not to mention all the white dust and noise that it generated. So at some point late last spring I said to heck with it, gleefully tossed it out, and figured I'd keep the plants that lived and wouldn't mourn any that passed. They're all fine. I do try to wick away heat from the lights with fans during really hot weather, but otherwise I'm not even using fans. Just leaving the window open at the top and bottom in there. They're growing fine. There is something romantic about high humidity for orchids that ties into the orchid-growing mystique. At this stage (when much of the "mystique" has departed from my efforts), my feeling is that adding humidity for your plants in a home situation is a waste of time, money and effort. The fussy ones didn't do any better with a fogger, and the non-fussy ones haven't done any worse!

FWIW,

John :>)

I agree with all the previous postings. Light is the key to good growing and flowering. Dendrobes like a lot of light. I would try to place all my orchids in the brightest spot in the house. I had an east facing office window once, it had a great view of Lake Michigan (in Chicago) but even that, my phalies didn't get enough light. Then they moved me to a south facing window office. My phals, paphs and catts took off and started to bloom. I placed the plants on humidity trays: shallow rectangular pans (like a shallow baking pan) with a grid over it. I watered the plants, allowing the excess water to fill the pan. It help create a small microclimate. I wouldn't bother with humidifiers. You have to constantly refill them with water. Just make sure you dump out the water in the humidity tray regularly so that algae doesn't form. Also, once a month, I would take the plants to the sink and drench them to leach out any build up of salts in the pot and mix. If you want to display your orchid, make sure the flowers are fully opened and hardened off. Then you can move them around the room to enjoy. But when they are finished flowering, return them to the bright growing area.

Humidity trays are an urban myth. They do not work. They should be called drip trays.
As i've written before. I'm sitting next to a 600 litre heated, aerated humidity tray. If things were as some people imagine i should be wiping sweat from the brow and topping up the water much more frequently.
Some scientific type should explain the amount of energy needed to evaporate water and the dynamics of how the water in the air diffuses rapidly so that the humidity readings throughout this house are more or less the same everywhere.

Gee, arthurm, myth or not, it just makes me feel so good to grow on humdity trys. I use them in conjunction with a humidifier in the middle of all the plants. It makes me feel like I'm doing something good for the plants.

They save my wood floors.

Going back to Howard's post...just wondering how much screening of the suns rays occurs in a humid atmosphere. Perhaps sunny days in the snowfields of the Australian "alps" or desert places with low humidity would have more footcandles that Howard's south sea paradise.
But light is not much of an issue here, except when i tell people at orchid shows that their Cymbidium placed on the south side of a house ( note Southern Hemisphere) all year will never flower.

At those same orchid shows, many people will tell you that they have a non flowering Phalaenopsis "in the bathroom". They think Orchid = tropical= humidity.

"Gee, Arthur ." indicates that the writer thinks that i am being a bit of a pain... but i do wish i had some "humidity trays" because then i could dribble some water into the Phal. Pots instead of carting the entire collection to the kitchen sink for watering. The phals being stuck on six inch wide window sills. I am so old that i remember those old fashoned inches, feet and stuff. Though when Tiger woods hit his sand iron 159 yards i had to do some mental arithmetic to visualise how far that is in metres.

Sorry, that this is a bit of a ramble, but i think it is rather amazing that as soon as the arid westerly winds blow that the the humidity levels in this house drop quickly even though the house is mostly kept closed.

Another senior moment. it was his pitching wedge.

Had a look at the readings at the nearby automatic weather station. Yesterday at 2.30pm the reading was 20% humidity. The speciosums in the garden seemed unaffected and the hundreds of orchids of various kinds in the shadehouse are fine though i did put the second layer of shadecloth back on top because spring is nearly here.

At that same AWS early morning readings were in the 90% range, so if you are worried about humidity, buy one of the gadgets and take a series of readings during the course of the day.

I agree with John Humidity is overrated and Arthur, humidity trays are urban myth. It may help with colour but that's about all. I'm a fine one to talk since I have a ton of humidity indoors. If you feel it necessary get a warm steam humidifyer. Not the cool one. The cool one does about the same job as a humidity tray and harbours very dangerous mold.

Howard is right about the light. Get that right and you can grow anything! To really understand the light they need takes some thinking. I recommend doing a garden web search for howard_a and try to embrace Howard's posts about light. They should be a book on their own. The man is a light genious.

Clara

Sorry, arthurm, I meant no offense. I don't think you're a pain. I was just kidding. In fact, I value you advice. I use the trays primarily because they make it so easy to water. I pour the water into the pots and it flows through into the trays where it eventually evaporates. No muss, no fuss. If the plants get some humidity from them, all the better. The ones that are hanging I have to take down and support them over a bucket and then wait for them to drain completely before I can hang them back up and that takes much longer.

Arthur, I have a 'drip tray' which is 6 inches wide and 3 ft long. Would fit your window.
You have Spring around the corner. How lucky! Summer is almost over here. But Winter brings blooms.

I use the drip trays, too. And yes, they save the floors and trips to the sink. BUT let's not forget how scuzzy they get. Yuck! They do have to be cleaned fairly often.

Then you have to either siphon off the water in a full tray or try to balance a half full tray on the way to the sink.

There just isn't a clean way to grow plants.

I like scuzzy, goes with scungy. The problem is that it is not my kitchen windowsill. It belongs to the dragon woman. A three foot long drip tray is not going to be a thing of beauty, but i might have a look around the junk shops to see what i can find.

Some of the plants are in pots hidden in blue cache thingos and there are sometimes things in flower so it doesn't look too bad but long sessions to water 40 plants are a pain.

I put some mild bleach water or algae preventer from the aquarium store in the trays every few weeks during the winter, and that seems to hold the scrunge at bay so that I don't have to clean them. I'll admit, by April they start looking kind of bad, but the plants are almost ready to go outside, so by then I don't care. Now I have to clean them out to get them ready for the plants to come back in!