Oh, and one more thing...
Kitty Litter. It's silica gel. Very low grade. It's physical makeup is such that it's very poorly constructed and doesn't lend itself to the electrical covalency required for adsorbtion. It lasts about a year before the pores are completely clogged with free hydrocarbons, rendering it completely useless as a humidity transfer media.
On top of that, it requires 9 times the surface area of Kitty Litter to provide the same transfer of water as ANY other beads. This means if you are using 2-8 ounce bags of HCM beads or RH Beads or any other beads, you'd need 18-8oz bags of kitty litter to achieve results that are remotely similar to that of ANY proper humidity control media.
Yes, it works. It works exactly the same as the rest, it works on the principle of equilibrium.
The differences are this...
Kitty litter holds far less water and reacts 9 times slower than anything else. The pores are so large that it plugs up 3 times as fast as anything else.
If Kitty litter costs $2 a pound, and other beads cost $60 a pound, it will take $18 worth of Kitty Litter every six months to maintain anything like equal protection for your cigars. So now it's $36 a year to use Kitty Litter for equal results. In two years you'll have spent just as much as if you bought beads that will last the rest of your life (HCM beads).
$36 is about the same cost as RH beads and Cigarmony beads, I believe. Mark and Dave's beads can easily last for years in a well-sealed humidor. They last a lot longer the less you pour water on them, but eventually they'll take on free hydrocarbons (turning yellow) as years pass and they won't react as quickly. No big, you just replace them. They've given you lots of years of excellent service.
With Michael's beads, they never degrade, never crumble, and the pores are 4 angstroms wide, which means that they are incapable of ever being plugged with free hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbon chains are simply too big to fit inside the beads.
They literally last forever with zero degradation in reactancy.
Now here's another nugget...
Although Dave and Mark's beads will take on hydrocarbons, they can NEVER completely fill with hydrocarbons. That's because some of the pores are 4 angstroms and below. If I recall correctly, that grade of silica gel has pores that run from 2 to 10 angstroms. So no matter how crumbly or brown they get, they will always continue to work, just not as well (in net aggregate terms) as when they were brand-spankin new. So in a sense, they will also last a lifetime. There's no need to ever throw them out, you can just add some new beads as they get older. We can always use extra beads.
This isn't so with Kitty Litter. They run from 24 to 12 angstrom pores, are wildly marginal in their structure, work like crap, and inside 6 months to a year they are completely worthless. You simply don't get what you pay for no matter how it shakes out.
There's one instance where Kitty Litter can be marginally effective, and a cheap addition to a humidor. That's if you use it as an extra water source in dry months. It does hold a large amount of water. It's much higher than the rest of the silica gel products and if I remember correctly it rivals the capacity of HCM beads. I'd have to dig forever to find numbers and I don't think I kept that test data. I've looked for it twice now and had no luck. If I had some Kitty Litter I could dry it and find out again, but it's not that important.
A person could use it as a water sink to provide extra water in his humidor and just replace it. Thing is, SAP (super absorbant polymer) would do the same and just as cheaply. Plus you can add a little PG solution to SAP and it won't mold up. You can use it all winter long.
One other place a person could use Kitty Litter is in long term storage where you're not getting in and out of a cooler or cabinet. Why someone would make sense of using a $2/lb media that's been tested and proven as completely and utterly inferior to anything else is beyond me, but it'd last a lot longer in that situation. Personally I'd not protect thousands of dollars of aging cc's with anything but the very best media available, but to each his own. I'm just trying to get the truth out there for the umpteenth time, I didn't spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars conducting tests for nothing.
My final word on the Kitty Litter is "smoke what you like, like what you smoke". If Kitty Litter makes sense and it's what someone wants to do, we should all respect it.
But we should also try to educate our friends. Spreading nonfactual information for or against any product doesn't help anyone. We're all more than smart enough to make our own intelligent choices once we're informed, and we're all free to use whatever media we want and support whatever company or individual we choose.
The bottom line is that they all work.
Dave, Mark and Michael have all been top-notch BOTL's from day one and have helped and supported many of us, myself included. The Kitty Litter people have never helped me out a bit, that I can remember.