Risk of overhumidification?

[Habana Mike]

Say a wineador has the drainage hole blocked and condensation pools in the bottom.

What's the risk of ill effects to the cigars?

[PigFish]

Here is an experiment for you Mike. Take a tupperware… any tupperware! Add a small vessel of water, open of course, seal it up with a hygrometer.

What is gonna' happen?

The open water will saturate the area above it with water vapor to the extent it can based on the amount of water available and the temperature. In other words, in a perfect world it will go to 100rH.

Sealed humidor systems require either: a dehydration cycle if free water is present in them or a system of balance, whereas the amount of water in them is all locked up in hygroscopic material and therefore not free.

Balance will come to any system where it is not driven to dehydration via a means to control energy. That is refrigeration to you and me!

You should never let water pool in a sealed humidor unless it actively dehydrates. Precision fast reading equipment (a good hygrometer) will show what I say to be true.

So to answer your question with a question. Are 100rH (or a reasonable facsimile there of) cigars suffering from ill effects? Yes, I think so!

Cheers! -Piggy

[nikesupremedunk]

^Pretty much summed everything up.

I had a similar experience when I first started out. I had pools of water in the wineador and a lot of my cigars became way over humidified. So bad that it was impossible to draw from the cigar once you light it up. (Wasted a lot of good cigars this way) Luckily I figured out something was wrong not too long after and I was able to save my cigars before anything happened. You can tell if a stick is too humid by feeling it. If it's as soft as a wet sponge then don't even think about lighting that up.

Taking care of a wineador can be extremely frustrating especially if the ambient temp is too high. If you are getting pools of water, it's not holding a steady Rh. Either your humi media is way too saturated, or your wineador fan is constantly on to try to lower the temperature (and produces lots of water which is not draining!) Now, I freeze everything and store everything in a tupperdor with 65% RH beads. I do not worry about temperature and my set up is always a rock solid 65% and my sticks smoke much better than they ever did with my wineador.

[PigFish]

^Pretty much summed everything up.

I had a similar experience when I first started out. I had pools of water in the wineador and a lot of my cigars became way over humidified. So bad that it was impossible to draw from the cigar once you light it up. (Wasted a lot of good cigars this way) Luckily I figured out something was wrong not too long after and I was able to save my cigars before anything happened. You can tell if a stick is too humid by feeling it. If it's as soft as a wet sponge then don't even think about lighting that up.

Taking care of a wineador can be extremely frustrating especially if the ambient temp is too high. If you are getting pools of water, it's not holding a steady Rh. Either your humi media is way too saturated, or your wineador fan is constantly on to try to lower the temperature (and produces lots of water which is not draining!) Now, I freeze everything and store everything in a tupperdor with 65% RH beads. I do not worry about temperature and my set up is always a rock solid 65% and my sticks smoke much better than they ever did with my wineador.

The problem here mate is not with the wine cooler, the ice chest, the 'old boy' box of cigars on the desktop. The problem with humidors, all of them, is that a large part of the cigar smoking public does not take the time to learn about what they do and why they do what they do.

Many smokers, don't even know why they store the cigars the way they choose to store them! They just know that someone whose opinion that they respect told them to do it that way.

I have said over and over again; if you have a perfect room, there is no need for a humidor! The problem is that most amongst us don't have that perfect room.

The wine cooler conversion humidor is not for the faint of heart; not for the designer anyway. It is a lot of hard work. A lot of theorizing and testing, development, redesign and rework. Wine coolers were not meant to be made into humidors. However with the right technique and equipment, I believe that they (arguably) make the best humidors in the world.

Now I have to place a caveat on that statement. If you have a perfect climate, well… you don't need one. But the further the climate gets from perfect, the better the wine cooler conversion humidor becomes as an option (with proper design).

I would like to see any design, put in conditions ranging from 50 to 90˚F, with rH ambients from 10 to 100rH that can get results like I do with a converted wine cooler. Factor in a range of $1500 to $2500 to build one that holds 50 boxes and they make the best humidors on the planet… MHO!

You open the door and let the hot air in and the humid air out, or vise versa, and in under 4 minutes, sometimes as fast a 5 seconds, the humidor and your cigars are in that perfect environment again! Part art, part science… the wine cooler humidor is not for everyone, but for a lot of my clients, it is the only choice that makes sense…!

Taking care of mine… Well the biggest problem I have is downloading data files from data loggers. These days, I find more problems with the data loggers that I use, I spend more time de-bugging them, than my humidors…

I don't need tupperware. I don't need a hygrometer in every box, beads and most of the rest of that high maintenance stuff. Yeah, I too use beads. Mine stay conditioned as a part of the consummate system that I build. It all maintains itself.

Cheers, Piggy

[Habana Mike]

Here is an experiment for you Mike. Take a tupperware… any tupperware! Add a small vessel of water, open of course, seal it up with a hygrometer.

What is gonna' happen?

The open water will saturate the area above it with water vapor to the extent it can based on the amount of water available and the temperature. In other words, in a perfect world it will go to 100rH.

Sealed humidor systems require either: a dehydration cycle if free water is present in them or a system of balance, whereas the amount of water in them is all locked up in hygroscopic material and therefore not free.

Balance will come to any system where it is not driven to dehydration via a means to control energy. That is refrigeration to you and me!

You should never let water pool in a sealed humidor unless it actively dehydrates. Precision fast reading equipment (a good hygrometer) will show what I say to be true.

So to answer your question with a question. Are 100rH (or a reasonable facsimile there of) cigars suffering from ill effects? Yes, I think so!

Cheers! -Piggy

Yes, this is what I would expect. Thanks for the validation.

Seems someone was offering a number of smokes on another board and, as I was checking up, noticed he had another thread about this particular problem happening a couple of weeks ago. To the point a box on the bottom got wet and soaked through several cigars.

The sale thread mentioned the cigars had been kept in his wineador at 65/65! I suggested otherwise and was treated rudely in response.