I had the same problem a year or so ago and I contacted Scott Shilala creator of Shilala's Beads and now called HCM Beads and this is how he explained everything to me.....
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Originally Posted by shilala
Hi Jason,
Sorry about your mess, brother. I feel your pain.
I wish I could draw a picture, it'd save a thousand words, but here I go...
When we create a humidor, we create a sealed environment with a very finite amount of water in there.
You'd probably say "Opening the door adds and subtracts water!!!", and it does. But that water is in the form of water vapor.
That's where a guy like me goes to math, volumes, and the properties of water in the two states, solid and vapor.
When I start massaging all those numbers, I find that opening and closing your door (or lid) only adds or removes a very, very, very, tiny amount of water vapor. I can literally open and close the door hundreds of times before there's an appreciable change in the RH inside the humi.
If those openings and closings happen across the seasons, things balance out. In most places humidity in the home is higher in the summer and lower in the winter, everything considered.
So now we have to look at time. More math. Ugh.
If we add up the time we've had the door open all year long, it isn't much. Let's use a ridiculous example. I go to my humidor 3 times a day, leaving the door open for 5 minutes each time because I never know what I want to smoke, and I do that every single day of the year.
If I total that up, it means that the door has been opened a grand total of 4 days time across the entire year.
If I left my humidor open for 4 days straight, I'm probably going to have an issue. With beads, I can fix it overnight. They can handle 4 days of water vapor, no problem. They'll only rise to the RH of the room around it, and I can dry that out in the fridge or freezer.
Fridge or freezer? Hmm. The water will go out of my beads and go into the fridge or freezer. How?
That's simple. The RH in the fridge or freezer is lower than that of the beads, so the water comes out of my beads as water vapor and into the air in the freezer. Once it's in the air in the freezer, it condenses on, get this, THE CONDENSER!!!
Oddly enough, our winadors have a condenser, too.
In freezers and fridges, the water drips off and collects in a pan, then goes out a drain.
In our winadors, we plug our drains. Why?
Because in winadors, we need a perfectly sealed, or hermetic environment, so that we can control the humidity. That's why they're called humidors.
In refrigerators and freezers, nobody cares. The drain is a wonderful thing, or water would run on the floor.
So, now we covered everything that goes on, at least to a degree. The things we have discussed, so far as the math and properties of water and how it acts, those things are static. When God's hand created all this, He made it all real simple. There are laws that do not change. We can count on them, and we can use those laws to help us live successful lives, and not be complete knuckleheads. I'm not even talking about The Commandments, I'm talking physical laws.
When I figure this stuff out, and Michael does the same, cause he knows all this crap, we look at what folks say.
Personally, I like to assume everything you said is solid accurate. But if that's the case, I have to assume you missed something.
The water you have puddled in there absolutely had to come from outside the humidor, because it didn't exist inside it until recently.
If the seal is okay, then there's probably a fist sized hole in the side or back of the unit. I can guess this cause you Texans like your big guns.
If there's no big holes, then we have to assume the seal isn't seating, because they fail after a year or two. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they fail. Or the unit gets racked cause it's not level, and the seal just isn't seating right.
Honestly, there could be a crack or seam anywhere that opened up. But it's big. Real big.
We know that for two reasons. It takes a HUGE volume of outside air to create that much water, especially in the dry winter.
So that unit is leaking 24 hours a day. So much so that it's changing the unit's temperature, making the cooling run all the time, condensing water and dumping it in the bottom.
Sorry, my brother. It happens. To avoid this misery, I use modified compressor driven refrigerators to store my sticks, and a big display humidor in our nice, cool basement.
You can start from scratch, fix that thing if you can, or drive up here and get this winador I built that I'm getting rid of.
Do me a favor and post this, will ya?
Maybe a "This is why my winador leaked" thread or something. That'd help guys a lot, cause I seldom want to type all this.
Hope this helps, my friend!!!
God Bless you and yours,
Scott
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I hope this helps you like it helped me.
