What's up brothers/sisters. I'm currently working with a Man O' War 100 count humidor it has been properly seasoned and I'm running it with 5 Boveda 65 packs, 4 on the bottom 1 on top, and 2 digital hygros. I am having fairly drastic issues with keeping the humidity stable. I searched the forums and saw that other people have had a similar issue where different areas of their humidor had different rh levels; however, in all of these cases the rh level was higher in the top of the humidor and lower in the bottom, which makes sense since water vapor rises. I however am having the opposite effect, the RH in the bottom of my humidor is constantly between 65-66% while the hygro stuck to the lid regularly reads 59-60%. When I move the bottom hygro to the top and the top hygro to the bottom I get the same result, the top is consistently 6-7% lower than the bottom. It's weird and I can't find an explanation for this anywhere, if anyone else has had a similar issue please let me know what to do.
Uneven humidity
- Thread starter Surewould
- Start date
ChuckMejia
The General
I've actually done a bit of research on this. To understand the "why" you must first understand that the Hydrometer is not measuring the water vapor, nor the moisture in the air. It is measuring the "relative" Humidity. This means it is measuring the percentage of water in the air relative to how much it can hold at that temp. The actual number of water molecules are the same throughout your Humidor. What is varying is the temp from the top to the bottom. Another principal you must be aware of is that the warmer the air, the more water molecules it can hold. So, here is what we know:
- RH is the measure of how much moisture is in the air, relative to how much it is capable of holding
- Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air
- Warm air rises (making the top of your humidor warmer than the bottom)
- Your RH will often be lower at the top of your humidor (even though the number of water molecules is the same throughout due to "diffusion")