So its been a while since I posted, to be honest due to the weather I have not had many cigars so nothing to review. I have however recently purchased a gadget for the humidor, so it seemed like a good time to do a review.
TFA Wireless Multi Sensor Thermo-Hygrometer
Not sure if anyone else has their humidors out of site, my flat is not massive and I have had to put my humidors in a cupboard, which is fine, but its a pain when you want to check humidity. I decided a wireless hygrometer would be ideal, I did a lot of searching but there are not many options
I was looking at the Xikar wireless hygrometer, as its a brand I use and trust, but at £69 with one sensor its not cheap (especially if you need more sensors), and you can only see the output of one sensor at a time, not great for a quick glance.
I also found a really nice wifi hygrometer with a phone/tablet app, but it was pretty expensive, and required an account etc as it used the cloud, probably overkill! In the end I did a bit of searching the Internet and found a couple of people who have reviewed a relatively cheap wireless hygrometer that can have up to 8 sensors attached to it.
The were doing them on Amazon for £39.99 (it comes with 3 sensors) so I picked one up. I have to say its pretty nice, you can see 3 readings on screen at a time, setup was a doddle, you can set high and low alarms for temp and humidity, and two sensors were bang on, the other was was 2% under, (I used my Western Calibre III’s as a quick comparison) not bad. The only thing I noticed is that they are not as quick to respond to changes as the westerns, but they are fast enough.
They are a little thicker than other hygrometers, but not too large, the displays on them are to small to really use, but I guess that not the point of them, as you have the nice receiver unit with the large LCD display.
Having had them for a few weeks I decided to do my regular hygrometer calibration using Boveda calibration kits, and it turns out that the Calibre I used for a quick comparison was perfectly calibrated, so as I thought, two of my sensors are spot on, and one reads 2% low, I can live with that.
Summary
I am really pleased with this hygrometer, its wifi range is good, it works well, the alarms are useful, and its cheaper and more flexible than the Xikar solution. It would be great if they responded a little quicker (but how often do you get catastrophic drops/rises in humidity in your humidors?), and it would be nice if you could calibrate each sensor individually.
Just these two changes would make it perfect, but its still very very good, and an ideal cheap solution if your humidors are hidden away. Well worth checking out.
UK Cigarnewbie 