In my last apartment where I had radiators, I bought some decorative planters to the top of the radiators and filled them with water like the LLBeam steamers. No lattice top, but they did the trick for a lot less than $49 a pop.

2 silly questions, but..
1) How do you know if you are too dry?
2) Could you experiment with a ceramic cup of water (small amount), before buying one?
Cheers

Oh my god thank you. Thank you SO MUCH for this suggestion.

I miss radiators!! This is the first place, as an adult, that we've been without them. I don't remember it being dry though? This forced air heat bit is much worse.

These were in almost every house in Italy when I lived there - took a while for me to figure out what it even was, but then I would always refill them and appreciated them. Now we have forced air heat in the States so unfortunately we can't do this anymore!

It's dry if you have flaky skin, small nose bleeds when you blow your nose in the morning, or you wake up with dry mouth.

@compact - Is your skin dry? When you wake up, is your throat very dry? This is a problem that people in winter seasons face. Your home gets warm but dry because there isn't enough moisture. Humidifiers help bring moisture back into a room. As for using a ceramic cup filled with water, that should definitely work in the same way, but I don't know how much water you'd lose to evaporation or how much dust you'd get in the water with open top containers. All of these are open top in one way or another, and I don't know if it is a problem for most people who use these things.

Any thoughts for forced air boxes? I have what is almost a radiator but with a fan to force air over it...

Growing up with the large, old-fashioned radiators, my parents just used anything that would hold water and stand up to the heat for humidifiers--I remember pie plates, bread pans and Pyrex dishes perched on top of various radiators around the house. It was one of our chores to go around the house with a big pitcher of water and refill them all every night.

For the newer, skinnier radiators, it would be harder to balance something on the top, and I can see how that first humidifier would be handy.

But $50 a pop for, what, 7-10 radiators in a house? Yikes.

I don't understand that last one... Why wouldn't you just put a kettle on instead of a pot like that? Then you add humidity to the air and you have hot water to drink if you like.

I bought the Kontrol ceramic humidifiers a few weeks ago (exactly like the one in the picture and my radiators are also like that). It's incredibly dry in my apartment and the radiators get very hot, but the water barely evaporates. In a week, less than half of the water has gone. I don't think it really makes much difference. So now I've decided not to dry my laundry but to hang it on a rack in my bedroom and rely on the drying clothes to put a bit of moisture back into the air.
I love the idea of these and that they don't make noise or use power, but has anyone had more success?

The absolute best humidifiers, which are also pretty expensive, but don't get moldy, are very quiet and maintain a perfect equilibrium are ventas. Musicians use them to maintain the environment where they have their instruments. WE always had them in the US , and they are made in Germany yet for some reason are not easily available in the UK...sniff sniff because if they were I would have a perfectly humidified bedroom...

Definitely miss radiator heat... like Xarcady, we had all kinds of baking dishes sitting on radiators in my last apartment, and growing up in my parent's house, the radiators had built-in, covered metal trays for water on top of the radiator. I

now have forced air for the first time in my life and definitely NOT a fan... SO dry! Been thinking about getting an Aprilaire humidifier installed... anyone have any thoughts about those? My little humidfier can't see to keep up.

@Cole Brodine - Do you mean you could put an open kettle on the radiator and use that instead? I suppose you could use practically anything as long as it conducted heat well, but I don't know if radiators ever get so warm you can get appropriately hot water out of it.

I am with the clothes hanging suggestion - of course it might not be an aesthetically pleasing solution. I have also used the almost dripping wet towel over a chair remedy (very useful in hotels!).

My last apartment had a few metal radiators with a lid/shelf that lifted up and had a flat metal compartment to pour water into. They were great! A bit rusty because they were probably at least 50 years old, but still convenient.

When I was a kid I remember my grandmother just keeping a mason jar of water behind her radiators to humidify. I've done this too and it gets the job done.

Houseplants will help put moisture back into the air.
Don't run a fan or open the window when you shower.
The bigger the surface area, the more water is going to evaporate, so a shallow open vessel (like the last one) will work better than a tall narrow one.

These are a very nice idea, and I've seen them all over Europe, but in reality they do very little. When cool mist humidifiers first hit the market in a big way, a colleague mentioned an article he read that said if your take a room's worth of Sarah desert air, it contains several gallons of water -- so a little humidifier with a gallon or 2 reservoir makes a very small dent in the dryness problem.

scandiclevelander -- we have installed an Aprilaire in our hot-air-heated condo, and it is terrific. My parents-in-law added one to their new home, too. But I recommend that you do not go the cheap route (as our plumber convinced my partner . . .) and get the pricier installation with remote sensor -- my in-laws got this and it keeps the apt. perfectly humid without having to make manual adjustments. Sometimes my partner pinches pennies at the very wrong moment!

Thanks for the suggestion haidy. I'll have to give a Venta humidifier a try. My skin gets so dry in the winter no matter how much I moisturize!

I've always had bowls of water on my radiators, but this is so much better! I was going to recommend a hack using the cermaic asker containers from ikea, but sadly it looks like they aren't stocking them anymore? I've got some and am going to give it a try. I bet you could find some other ikea hanging caddies that would work.

Any pocket type wall vase will do the trick here as well. And cooking lots of soup.

Sometimes a symptom of dry indoor air is actually more like a cold - swollen sinuses that feel clogged. Forced air heat is usually pretty dang dry. In the past I used a fancy vornado humidifier - but I found that one of those baby crane cool mist humidifiers in the bedroom running at night works just fine too.

my apartment uses the type that fills with hot water and emits the radiant heat--- i've thought many times, if only they'd thought years ago to build them in a way that allowed some steam to escape...

Ah...how timely. I just spent ten days in an apartment in Rome and all the radiators had those ceramic things hanging off of them...my kids asked, "What are they?" And I said, "I don't know...planters??"

(Southerner here....never had a radiator for heat!)

I have to say that I agree with haidy. I purchased a bunch of the metal ones from Killian's Hardware, imagining the first winter on record of non-flyaway hair and flaking skin. No such luck. The water just sits there. Took over 2 wks before I had to fill them...

I made about half a dozen of these in ceramics class to use as wall vases. Now they have a winter use too!

Another suggestion is to heat water on your stove. Once it starts steaming, the humidifying process has begun. Turn the heat to its lowest setting after it starts steaming.

Depending on the layout of your home, it may take a while to travel around and have an impact on every room. You could also add your favorite essential oil to the water to make it smell good too. I used eucalyptus oil and it was wonderful.

WARNING: Do NOT leave the heating water unattended for long. I set a loud timer/alarm to come back and check on it to make sure the water has not run out. If the water runs out, you could ruin your pot, or worse, burn down the house.