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The Cedar Room A place for cigar storage and cigar accessories discussions. |
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01-06-2002, 01:06 PM | #1 |
Member
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Charlotte, NC USA
Posts: 662
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With winter upon us, my humi's are again having trouble keeping up humidity with the dry, heated air in the house. My old solution was to add another humidifier, but that made problems with uneven humidity worse. So I finally decided to install some small fans in my humi's and coolerdors.
I have 3 Stewart-Beckwith display style humi's and two Coleman upright medium-size coolers. Each has enough room to install a micro fan aimed to blow over the humidifier, in this case a soap dish with floral foam. If you have a traditional desk-top box humi, this won't work - go with a Cigar Oasis instead. Better candidates are coolerdors, fridge-a-dors, or converted cabinets and trunks. The fans I used were Radio Shack 40mm, 12V DC micro fans, rated at 5.3 cfm. These are really too big, but the smallest I could find locally. I mounted each one so it wouldn't vibrate and set it about 4 inches away from, and aimed at, the foam. Since these fans are DC, I bought a 12V plug-in inverter and connected all 5 fans to it using small gauge, twin strand wire. Check the milli-amp rating on your fans, add them up and make sure the total is not more than the inverter is rated for. Yeah, this meant drilling a hole for the wire, but a dab of latex caulk or a rubber grommet fixed that. (Another reason not to do this in a cedar-lined box!) Because of the high fan cfm rating and to allow some adjustability, I plugged the inverter into a digital timer that allows up to six on/off cycles a day. Right now the fans come on for 10 minutes every 4 hours. A better setup would have been 2-3 cfm fans that run longer cycles, but this seems to be working okay for now. I may add a rheostat to slow the fans down a bit and run them longer. So far so good. Humidity is increasing gradually and hopefully is more even top to bottom. Just thought I'd put this out here in case others are having a problem with Old Man Winter drying out their stogies. If you've done something like this and have had time to fine tune it, feel free to share! |