Ambient humidity and seasonal behavior changes

I have two wooden humidors. One is a cheaphumidors.com 150 unit, the other is one (75ct) I picked up from a cuban artisan while vacationing there. The holiday one has a bit of a twist to the lid (damn them cubans making woodcrafts in natural 70+% RH). I have added some foam weather-stripping to the inside of the lid and this has helped.

I keep 4 oz of heartfelt 70%'s in each. While it takes about a day to return to 65%, the CH humidor does get back there (though it takes a whole 4 seconds for the RH to start dropping once I open the lid). I only seem to need to charge the beads about once a week. That's north of Edmonton, where the RH is so low that my digital hygrometers can't read the RH if left out of the humis for more than a couple minutes.

Now, the holiday humidor is a little more problematic, this one is sitting at 55%, but the sticks are still smoking well. I recharge these beads at the same time.

My trick has been to put the beads into snack-sized zip-lock bags (the mini bags) and then I spray them down with distilled water from a spray bottle. I can over saturate the beads and they slowly absorb and give off the extra water. Further, the ziplocks give a high open surface area to volume ratio and can be crammed into any free area within the humidor. Flipping the zip portion of the bag inside-out forces the bag to hold itself open as well.

Mind you, 4 oz of beads should cover 2160 cubic inches of humidor (according to retailer). With my humis measuring at 500 (for the 150 cnt) and 375 (75 cnt), this is supposedly overkill. Theoretically, I should be able to bring my bead counts down to 1 oz for either. But, I am happy with what I am doing now. Its probably important to know that I am running both of these humis at near capacity as it is.

I may have to bomb someone to make some space (hint hint)



Cheers

Cy