Before she went on her extended trip overseas, HA bought a little plastic essential oil diffuser. She brought it to me because she couldn’t get it to work. It was clearly defective out of the box, and a quick search revealed that it is quite common for these to arrive defective or break a few days after being placed in service. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this particular model.
That said, I think she paid around $10 for it and it probably wasn’t worth the hassle of returning it. I have a bad habit of trying to repair defective goods, and I certainly didn’t want to just throw it away. I also liked the fundamental design: instead of heating, it appears that it uses an ultrasonic transducer to cavitate water, and the resulting vapor floats up through the oil which thus gets atomized. I made a quick repair and, though it feels as if the on/off switch will likely fail again soon, the thing actually works at the moment.
She also bought an oil that I didn’t much care for. I’ve been fiddling with various substances, and decided what I liked best was putting a few drops of alcohol-based vanilla extract in the thing. I honestly didn’t expect to like it. Cloying, overwrought, dense vanilla scent (as in some scented candles) doesn’t work for me. In this case, though, it’s mild, quite pleasant, and refreshingly tropical (we have a vanilla plantation a couple of miles from here).
If you have a diffuser, give it a try. If you don’t have a diffuser but like scenting your environment, try an ultrasonic diffuser. Just don’t get this one.
—2p