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If you want to get your nursery humidity under control, eliminating painfully dry air, you may need a humidifier for babies. While every humidifier needs to be cleaned—anything that pushes water droplets into the air can also place germs there, too—we need to be extra careful when it comes to our little ones. With that in mind, we’ve collected humidifiers—like our best overall, the Levoit LV600S—with a reduced capacity to put harmful microbes into our home’s air, making them the best humidifiers for babies.
- Best overall: Levoit LV600S
- Best evaporative: Honeywell Cool Moisture
- Best design: Chivalz 6L
- Best for families: Vicks Cool Relief Cool Mist Humidifier
- Best budget: Vicks Starry Night
How we chose the best humidifiers for babies
Humidifiers for babies were primarily picked for their ability to produce a reasonable amount of humidity with a mechanism considered by medical professionals to be safe for babies. Further, we looked for form factors that were stable and unlikely to tip over. Finally, whenever possible, we searched for features that might benefit parents of the youngest people.
The best humidifiers for babies: Reviews & Recommendations
The following humidifiers for babies will give you a sizable enough selection to make a pick without getting overwhelmed by the details. We include a mixture of both evaporative and ultrasonic humidifiers for babies and encourage you to read our primer on the safety of each type. All humidifiers for babies should be cleaned thoroughly, properly, and often. For each one, we’ll review what makes it a safer-than-standard pick and what features you might want to utilize.
Best overall: Levoit LV600S
Specs
- Type: Ultrasonic (cool mist) + warm mist
- Tank capacity: 6L
- Size: 11.6 x 7.7 x 11.3 inches
- Noise level: <28dB (Sleep mode)
Pros
- Can produce cool and warm mist
- Boxy, reachable tank
- Includes cleaning materials
- Sponge filtering
- Recommended by Levoit for babies
- Sturdy body
Cons
- Somewhat expensive
Levoit’s LV600S has everything you need to humidify your baby’s room. It can come out in the living room, too, as it works in rooms up to 700 square feet or more. While it is an ultrasonic humidifier, meaning that it puts full water particles up into the air and therefore needs to be made ultra-clean, it is easy to clean and convenient to use.
First of all, whenever you search for the best humidifiers, you’re bound to find a Levoit product. This one, however, is the top Levoit-recommended baby humidifier, and it does something special to earn that privilege. It uses a combination of warm and cool mist (via the ultrasonic dispersion technique) to moisten your air. While warm mist is considered unsafe when a toddler is left alone with it, under your supervision, it can humidify the room quickly. Then, when you leave, you can switch it to the safer cool mist to keep the humidity at the desired level. This rare feature provides the best of both worlds.
Next, the Levoit LV600S uses filters. While some count this as a negative, due to added maintenance, you should be cleaning your baby’s humidifier on the regular anyhow and the filter adds to safety. Speaking of cleaning, the Levoit LV600S comes with a cleaning tool and has a boxy, rounded-edge shape for easy cleaning. Check out the Levoit LV600S’s manual (cleaning instructions start on page 16) to get a peek ahead of the process. Many organizations recommend always using distilled water and cleaning baby humidifiers every three days.
This product is convenient to use. It has smart controls, checks humidity itself, and can be set to a certain level for automatic shut-off. There’s a sleep mode for a quiet nursery, too, so no waking up baby. Plus, a full tank has a 50-hour use span.
Best evaporative: Honeywell Cool Moisture
Specs
- Type: Evaporative (cool mist)
- Tank capacity: 1.1 gallons
- Size: 10.4 x 18.5 x 13 inches
- Noise level: Very quiet (not specified)
Pros
- Wick evaporation technique is very quiet
- Every water-touching part is dishwasher safe
- UV light cleaning treatment
- Sturdy form factor
Cons
- Will need to change evaporation wicks regularly
If you’re looking for evaporative-style humidity, this is the way to go for your baby. Evaporation is, as you may have noticed, particularly quiet, and it isn’t any less so for this humidifier. The moisture comes out invisibly, as well, with no mist sprays ready to get nearby objects wet and dripping. Additionally, the wick (the part of the humidifier that draws up water and distributes moisture) will pick up minerals, reducing white dust potential.
Though there is a UV light for killing viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, you’ll still need to change this wick filter periodically, as part of your regular maintenance and cleaning. Note that in addition to not adding any noise to a system, a wick will not vibrate everything in the water into the air, making it potentially safer than an ultrasonic humidifier. Put all together, the Honeywell produces a gentle fan-like noise, producing quality white noise for sleep.
The body of the Honeywell Cool Moisture humidifier is sturdy, in an almost toaster-like shape with four legs. While you’ll want to do regular cleanups with a distilled water finish to keep as many chemicals out of the machine as possible, it is worth noting that if you use this seasonally only, you can pop the important water-touching parts in the dishwasher without harming them. Then, wiping it down with distilled water will prepare you for another round of usage.
Best design: Chivalz 6L
Specs
- Type: Ultrasonic (cool mist)
- Tank capacity: 6L
- Size: 9.4 x 12.7 x 7.4 inches
- Noise level: <26 dB
Pros
- Noise suppressor keeps volume low
- Uses filters and includes cleaning brush
- Dual mister for increased exposure
- Easy access tank
Cons
- No single nozzle option
The Chivalz 6L is easy to use and emphasizes getting fog and moisture in your nursery quickly. It has a 5-second fog output time and processes 300ml of water per hour. All of that gets pushed out through a dual-mister system, which also has the advantage of exposing more of the room to the mist, which is part of the reason we also consider this one of the best humidifiers for plants, who greatly need this exposure. However, there’s no option to switch to a single nozzle output, which may be inconvenient for those with cramped spaces. You’ll need to clear more area around the nozzles to prevent objects from getting wet.
You should appreciate the Chivalz 6L’s large, accessible tank and included cleaning brush. Routine cleaning is done in just a few steps, including wiping the large open insides, rinsing with water, and removing and either rinsing or replacing the filter. There are no complicated steps. It has a soft blue night light option, but it will also glow red when the water gets low enough to engage the humidifier’s auto-off feature. In other words, there is a lot of help to make using the humidifier simple.
Best for families: Vicks Cool Relief Cool Mist Humidifier
Specs
- Type: Ultrasonic (cool mist)
- Tank capacity: 1.2 gallons
- Size: 11.9 x 8.5 x 9.5 inches
- Noise level: Not specified
Pros
- Convenient, no filter design
- Works easily with Vicks products
- Great for family rooms, too
Cons
- Lose the added protection of filters
If you’re looking for a humidifier to soothe your and your children’s colds when the inevitable family sickness strikes, Vicks may be the place to go. Like the Vicks Starry Night humidifier, you can use it with Vick VapoPads for extra comfort during times of sickness. It works well in both small and medium-sized rooms, as well, so when a sickness passes through the house you can share the humidifier in larger bedrooms, too, or try it in the family room together.
The lack of a filter on the humidifier has a clear pro and a clear con. The pro? You don’t need replacements and don’t have to fool with replacing it. The con? You don’t get the extra clean it provides. However, regular and proper cleaning, usage of distilled water, and careful monitoring of the humidifier should make this humidifier that is labeled as being for “baby, kids, adults” a safe product for you to use.
Best budget: Vicks Starry Night
Specs
- Type: Evaporative (cool mist)
- Tank capacity: 1 gallon
- Size: 11.3 x 13.2 x 11.4 inches
- Noise level: Very quiet (not specified)
Pros
- Antimicrobial filtration
- Fun star display in seven colors
- Includes soothing Vicks VapoPads
- Very affordable
Cons
- Will need to change evaporative wicks regularly
Vick’s Starry Night is a humidifier designed for babies and kids, which we can see through a few of their design choices. Most obviously, you’ll see the fun star and moon display that projects onto the wall, giving your baby’s nursery a fun atmosphere and reducing any fear of the new machine. It looks pretty, adds essentially no cost to the machine (while we didn’t target any budget products this time around, this product has the lowest MSRP of the bunch), and gives your nursery a delightful on-them look — even if it isn’t one of the most scientifically accurate star projectors ever made.
Next, it comes with Vicks VapoPads, which are designed to soothe your child. As an example, one of the pads is this calming menthol and lavender, which releases up to 8 hours of vapors for a sick child. Their product guidance includes information for babies under 10 pounds (use no more than two pads in 24 hours) and should be safe and ready to use for your baby, but be sure to consult your doctor or pharmacist should you have any questions.
What to consider before buying the best humidifiers for babies
Getting that humidifier for baby can be a huge step if you’re worried about your beautiful little alien angel or even humidifiers in general. Here are the key things to look at.
Humidifier type
Not every type of humidifier is considered adequate for babies, who don’t have fully developed immune systems. As a result, you likely won’t feel comfortable picking the same humidifier that you would for yourself when nasal congestion season comes. Here are the types of humidifiers most experts will suggest you look into:
Ultrasonic humidifiers: These humidifiers use high-speed vibrations to create an ultrafine mist, pushing water into the local atmosphere, thereby increasing humidity. However,
