Lowering humidity with Bovedas


HoyoFan

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Curious if anyones lowered humidity in their humidor with Boveda packs. My understanding is they ship basically fully saturated. So they wouldn’t necessarily be good at bringing humidity down but I could be wrong.

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I throw in a few dried out ones into humidors and they tend to absorb excess--then I take them out. Most will probably tell you that adding more beads should help there. 

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In my experience, they can only reduce humidity when they've dried out at least a little.  I throw a dried out one along with a fully charged one into each of the tupperdors and that seems to work for me. 

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1 hour ago, HoyoFan said:

Curious if anyones lowered humidity in their humidor with Boveda packs. My understanding is they ship basically fully saturated. So they wouldn’t necessarily be good at bringing humidity down but I could be wrong.

If that's the case you could dry them out, storing them in a tupperware container with something that'll suck humidity until they're dry.

But in general I think the best setup is where you're adding humidity not removing it (not always possible of course).

My storage room varies between 50% RH and 70%RH, so some of the time I am using boveda to lower humidity, or at least maintain lower humidity.

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In principle a boveda pack is a pack of water with a membrane that absorbs or releases moisture at the given percentage of relative humidity. A saturated pack (filled pack of water) will not allow for more water to be absorbed as it's already full. So best practice in fluctuating environments is probably having one (or a few, depending on the volume of air we're talking about) unsaturated pack that can absorb and release water depending on the fluctuations. It appears unprecise but a fully saturated pack feels like a bag of water and a a dried out pack feels solid. You'd want something in between. 

And yes, I have reduced humidity using boveda. I sometimes use unsaturated 62% boveda packs to reduce "recent purchases" before they go into my common 65% storage. I have tried to convince my local B&m to keep 65 but they seem to really like 69 (yes yes, pun intended) 

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I use the 62RH Bovedas in the 68g size. They generally arrive weighing about 70g. I did some testing and found that at that point they were basically fully saturated and wouldn't absorb much.

In my case, using 8x 68g 62RH Bovedas for a single Iris 44qt container full of freshly delivered boxes took several months to get RH settled and multiple rounds of drying out the Boveda packs. I would just lay them on my desk for a few days until they dried out down to about 60g, then put them into my tupperdors. From there they seemed to do reasonably well at absorbing moisture up until they started to get close to 70g again. It was excruciatingly slow, though. They just absorb moisture much more slowly than they release it. Perfectly adequate for maintaining RH levels but definitely slow at reducing them.

For what it's worth, I'm sure I could've sped up the process quite a bit by letting the boxes breathe out in the open but I wasn't in a rush and was willing to try this in the name of science. Far from exact, but based on my measurements I would estimate I needed to remove an average of 1-3g of moisture per freshly delivered box to settle down at 62RH, based on measuring the weights of my Boveda packs over time. Obviously varies based on vendor, box size and type, cigar size, etc, but it at least gives an order of magnitude.

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Save the 65RH crunchies for this very purpose. I put them in an overhumidified 70RH box purchase and left them a month and they did the trick perfectly. Was afraid freezing the aged delicate wrappers with that much moisture would lead to some rupture. Now, the waiting for the cigars to feel happy about being frozen after having their drenched souls sucked out.

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4 hours ago, saltbox said:

62RH Bovedas in the 68g size. They generally arrive weighing about 70g. I did some testing and found that at that point they were basically fully saturated and wouldn't absorb much.

Your experiment and I would be willing to extrapolate even further and state that a fully charged Boveda pack may be a better measure of RH than any tools available to the usual collector. There are several threads in the Humidor section and lowering humidity is one of them.

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1 hour ago, La_Tigre said:

Save the 65RH crunchies for this very purpose. I put them in an overhumidified 70RH box purchase and left them a month and they did the trick perfectly. Was afraid freezing the aged delicate wrappers with that much moisture would lead to some rupture. Now, the waiting for the cigars to feel happy about being frozen after having their drenched souls sucked out.

Not only can the “aged delicate cigar wrappers” be damaged, but the layers of the Boveda”sandwich which membrane” need the slower osmotic process to work. 

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1 hour ago, MossybackR said:

Not only can the “aged delicate cigar wrappers” be damaged, but the layers of the Boveda”sandwich which membrane” need the slower osmotic process to work. 

All we know is we put dried out 65RH small bovedas in a cab and came out with partially filled 65RH and cigars that weren’t stored like non-Cubans. 

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   I’ve used a Govee hygrometer w/ Bluetooth to keep track of the RH in my humidors. I got a bit worried about RHs that were approaching (and exceeding) 70%RH, even though the humidors (Igloo-a-dors in most cases) seemed to  be keeping at the RH that I preferred — 65 +/- 3%. I upgraded to a WiFi version of the Govee w/ 3 remote sensors, and tested the Bluetooth version with rhe salt test while they were in transit. It turned out to be reading about 6% too high. The 3 sensors that came in read 74-75%.

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Just now, MossybackR said:

Far safer than just soaking the “crunchies” in water.

Ahh, now understood. Crunchie recharge method is in a warm place (hot water heater closet) in a freezer ziploc with a full bowl of distilled water inside of it. 

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  • JohnS changed the title to Lowering humidity with Bovedas
  • 3 months later...

I've been having issues with two acrylic humidors where the temp dropped and the humidity spiked.  I tried replacing 65% Bovedas with 58% Bovedas but it didn't help.  It just dawned on me I was putting brand new packs in there so not giving the humidity anywhere to go.  😥

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On 9/7/2022 at 1:28 PM, Ites said:

I sometimes use unsaturated 62% boveda packs to reduce "recent purchases" before they go into my common 65% storage.

This has been helpful....

I'm afraid to ask this question....but are you guys saying that fresh arrivals are sometimes "over humidified". How bad are we talkling? WAY over humidified or just in the low 70's or something?  I never thought about it before and always assumed the danger would be under-humidification during transit. But, it makes perfect sense that the opposite could be true as well, especially during the winter months when the temp drops.

Any thoughts on how common "over-humidification" is on newly delivered cigars and/or how bad?  Is this more common from certain sources? Thanks in advance.

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To lower humidity I use kitty litter pearls. Fill a soup bowl with the beads and put it in whatever kind of box u are using to store your cigars. The RH will drop. Once you are where you want your RH, switch the beads out for the Bovedas or what ever you use. You can dry out the beads  or throw them away, at 15$ for 7 pounds they are cheap. 

image.jpeg.bff6f8cd811c2500da1cce0b9ee0f9b0.jpeg

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10 hours ago, joeypots said:

I use kitty litter pearls

I owe the world, and at least 1.5 ex girlfriends, an apology.  I was wrong, there is a purpose for domesticated non-farm cats and/or kitty-kat cartoon characters! Cats are the reason that these dang pearls exist!

Oh cats......

 

 

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On 12/20/2022 at 5:49 AM, Lamboinee said:

 

This has been helpful....

I'm afraid to ask this question....but are you guys saying that fresh arrivals are sometimes "over humidified". How bad are we talkling? WAY over humidified or just in the low 70's or something?  I never thought about it before and always assumed the danger would be under-humidification during transit. But, it makes perfect sense that the opposite could be true as well, especially during the winter months when the temp drops.

Any thoughts on how common "over-humidification" is on newly delivered cigars and/or how bad?  Is this more common from certain sources? Thanks in advance.

For me personally it's just a matter of knowing that the two-three vendors I mostly use love to store their stock a little higher than what I prefer. The shelves at my local b&m usually read 69ish so nothing critical. I've done this a few times if I would fill half of an air-tight container with new stock. I wanted to reduce the humidity in the new stock a little before storing them just so I don't need to worry too much about increasing my storage humidity without burping it. Honestly I think it's a little overthinking on my part but this worked for me so there's that. 

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