wineadore headche

[poolmar]

hi, mine name is poolmar i am brand new here and i am a cuban fanatic.
ok, this might well of been covered somewhere on here before, but i am just learning to navigate the site first ...so
first
1 i switch my wineador off (because at 64f the fans cool it down to 52-55%)
2 - so its now a box with half a pound of heartfelt 65 % beads at the bottom the same in the middle and nothing at the top
65% ?????.....my readings are off the chart on my two calibrated hydrometers 78- 84% !!.....and these have been dried out, not completely, but a lot of moisture has been removed with a hairdryer .
any help would be great for a newbie here

[PigFish]

... let me know if my speculation on your project bears fruit.

-Piggy

[Joshtupps]

Any update here @poolmar?

[poolmar]

ok had a chat with pigfish and all is sorted ,,,i am glad there wasn't many response's because things can get very confusing with everyone giving their ideas, so i decided to have a chat with pigfish.

so to cut a long chat short 

Lesson one. Don’t plug it in.

 

I don’t care what everyone else says about Newair humidors. THEY DON’T WORK!

 

Here is what is happening (speculation, but probably right on the money).

 

Wine cooler makers got tired of wine people telling them that the corks on their wines were drying out. So they started to put a pocket or holding vessel below the coolers to hold some water and keep the rH up after a cooling cycle. This is ‘free water’ mate… by definition!

 

So what happens. You take your box, seal it up with free water, enough to saturate your desiccant product (something that you are using (misusing) as a passive means to control rH) and the rH goes through the roof.

 

Want to solve it today? Do what I told you earlier. Clear the wine cooler out. Put it on a plastic bag, not on your carpet or wood floor, and lay it over on its face with the door off. Water will likely drain out of the TE cooler area. Let it dry.

 

After the beads are tested for equilibrium rH (lets assume you did not over saturate them) then just put them back, with the cigars, with the cooler unplugged and enjoy your passive sealed humidor (not cooler).
 

so the problem was i had it switched on!!

i turned it off ....AND still the humidity was off the charts at 78-79 %.....the problem was the TE cooler still had a load of water in it and thats wherre the humidity came from!
so,..i drained it ,,,let it dry over night and bang ..sitting pretty for the last week at 65-68% ....RAYS A genius

[SloppyJ]

Thank you for the follow up. After watching Pig's video with his PMC vs. RH vs. Temp curves, I decided to unplug mine as well. I have 2lbs of beads in there and so far there hasn't been any RH variation and my temp has gone up about 10°F. I'm very interested in the results. A lot of my cigars were tasting muddled and seemed wet to me. I don't have the experience to correlate my smoking experience to my storage conditions so I'm going out on a limb. 

As a side experiment, I have picked a few specific cigars out to weigh every night. I just started it tonight. I went to school and took part in too many labs to let this situation fly past me without taking the opportunity to gather some empirical data. 

I'm almost out of room in my humidor for any more boxes. With all of that substrate, this transition might take some time. In the meantime, I'm setting up a small tuperware container with some 62% bovedas to get the party started. I have a fishing weekend booked in a few weeks so I'm going to try to get some cigars "dry boxed" to see how they taste. My goal is to keep this setup rolling and sample the same cigars from both of these humidors to see if I can taste a difference. 

[poolmar]

turn it off and drain it over night ..get the free standing water out of it

[poolmar]

4 hours ago, SloppyJ said:

Thank you for the follow up. After watching Pig's video with his PMC vs. RH vs. Temp curves, I decided to unplug mine as well. I have 2lbs of beads in there and so far there hasn't been any RH variation and my temp has gone up about 10°F. I'm very interested in the results. A lot of my cigars were tasting muddled and seemed wet to me. I don't have the experience to correlate my smoking experience to my storage conditions so I'm going out on a limb. 

As a side experiment, I have picked a few specific cigars out to weigh every night. I just started it tonight. I went to school and took part in too many labs to let this situation fly past me without taking the opportunity to gather some empirical data. 

I'm almost out of room in my humidor for any more boxes. With all of that substrate, this transition might take some time. In the meantime, I'm setting up a small tuperware container with some 62% bovedas to get the party started. I have a fishing weekend booked in a few weeks so I'm going to try to get some cigars "dry boxed" to see how they taste. My goal is to keep this setup rolling and sample the same cigars from both of these humidors to see if I can taste a difference. 

Sounds like a good plan

[luvdunhill]

Well, some counterpoint. I have six NewAir winedors and they are good enough for me. I run the cooler to about 10 degrees below (external) ambient. I use 65% HCM beads. I have a few percentage points variance from the bottom of each to the top internally and would like to design a fan to help with circulation. My graphs are pretty much all similar to this one, with the spikes being reorganization.