Holee sack, Adam. lol
That's just one of those itty bitty guys. You're absolutely right, I stand corrected. You manged to get enough water in there that the solution is no longer salt-saturated.
The ones I'm messing with are the big 65% ones. I dried them out completely and there's a good amount of salt in there. So much so that if I filled it like a ready-to-pop balloon like yours, it should remain saturated.
Now I'm not sure, though. I think I'll fill them the rest of the way and mess around with it some more.
It does make sense, what you found out. If these things are made with just enough salt to saturate the design amount of water, that creates a stumbling point for recharging them. Get too crazy and it's going to give up copious amounts of vapor till it reaches saturation again and starts to work right.
If we didn't know what was going on, we'd likely try recharging once, assume it doesn't work, and not bother again. Easier to just buy some new ones.
Thanks for hanging with me on this, my brother. Ya know, this is just how we all invented the hcm and hcs beads. A whole bunch of guys back at the old place joined me and we messed with a bunch of media till we got it all dialed in with real-world data.
I still haven't figured out how to improve on hcm beads. I tried tons of salts, denatured alcohols, glycols, combinations of those, saturated polymers, everything I could think of.
It's still easier just to use hcm beads with Boveda packs for an extra water-sink and to keep them dialed in. It's an awesome combo.
