Temp Issues
Living in So. Cal., especially in the summer (103 degrees today), it is way too expensive to keep my house cooled at 70 degrees. I keep my humidor near the floor where it is coolest and in a room that is not pounded by the daytime sun. Bottom line, my house temperature hovers around 75 degrees, sometimes higher or lower, depending on when I am at home. My cigars seem to be okay and smoke great. I know during the cooler season it will be no problem keeping them cooler. I am sure this has been argued already several times so bare with me. Any reasonable solutions or does everyone else just deal with it?
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With that said, I have a "sudo" wine fridge I fixed up... It's actually a "real" fridge that I bought for practically nothing in a local paper classifieds ad. I found a temperature probe that drives a contactor for a 110v outlet... So basically I can set the box at 70 degrees and fridge set at it's coldest setting... When it gets to like 71 the power comes on and cools it down to about 69 and then kills the power... Works well, but a wine fridge would be simpler, albiet much more expensive...
As a side note though... I DO keep a humi in the house... It's more of a "too be smoked sometime in the next month or two" humi... My temp indoors stays right around 75... I watch it pretty closely but so far it's been great... I'm not entirely convinced that 75 is a problem to be honest, even for sustained periods... I guess time will tell...
The wine fridge is a viable option as well as rusirius mentioned, though it is a bit costly. Personally, if I were you I wouldn't worry unless you start seeing little holes in your cigars, then it is time to rethink a solution.
I live in the City of Hemet. Not the desert but close.
Not to get away from my original question here, but it is very hot & dry in Hemet. The humidity the last few days has been around 10%. I know weather accross the country differs so we all have issues one way or the other. By the way, I live at State St. x Whittier Ave....Thanks for the responses, I usually post questions rather than answers.
The problem with either of these devices is that they draw moisture out of the air via condensation... Condensation occurs when water vapor in the air comes into contact with a surface that is below the dew point for that given pressure and humidity.
It doesn't matter if that surface is cooled via vapor compression, thermoelectric, termotunnel, pulse tube, or any other sort of cooling device... ALL that matters is that the surface is cooled below the dew point and causes water vapor to condense...
Using a simple equation for calculating dew point (which may be off by like +/- 1 degree, but close enough for our purposes and MUCH easier to use) we find that at 70% humidty and 70 degrees F is right around 59 degrees F.
So if you REALLY wanted this to work in this way (i.e. without any other sort of regulation) what you could do is set up the same type of system, but also monitor the coils... If the coils reached a temperature of 60 degrees, lock out the compressor (or peltier or any other type of cooling) from being able to run until they warmed back up to say 65... The coils would still cool obviously since they're still much cooler than the target temperature of 70, but they will never get cooler than dew point so no condensation and therefore humidity level will never change (given a sealed environment of course)
HOWEVER... I haven't found it to be a problem thus far... To begin with, I don't store the cigars in there out in the open... I still keep them in humis... The humi regulates the humidity just like it would in any other environment... During summer time it really doesn't run very frequently, and I guess because it's such a small shift that's required when it does run the coils don't seem to get too cold and condense water vapor, or at least not any noticable amount...
During winter time I plan on wiring a bulb in there... much like you would for a welding fridge... That should keep things happy as well...
It's certainly far from possible though... In fact, peltiers are used in many different models of dehumidifiers...
again, this is all based on limited knowledge of the physics and the electronics.