Review: WiFi Digital Hygrometer – £39.99

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.

Link to Hygrometer

Review: Cheap Digital Hygrometer – £6.95!

As readers of my blog may know I currently have two different makes of digital hygrometer, the Angelo, and the Western Caliber Iv. I like both these hygrometers, the Angelo because it is cheap at around £14, but it is quite large and its calibration is not adjustable, the Western because its small and it can be calibrated, but it is expensive at £25.

A few weeks ago I was just about to purchase another Western hygrometer (I needed the Western due to its size) when I stumbled upon these hygrometers on Amazon. I almost passed them by, but they seemed to have a couple of reviews that were okay, and I noticed the price £6.99 each !!!!!!!!

So I thought why the hell not get one and see if its okay, at that price its not much of a risk, then I thought, ahh if I get 2 I get free shipping ! So I did.

When they turned up they were far better than I expected, construction is pretty good, the display is clear, battery access is simple. So I stuck them in a Boveda calibration bag, and decided to see what happened. As you can see form the picture above after 24 hours one was pretty much spot on, and the other was only 3% out.

Now as these are not able to be calibrated you just need to add a sticker with the adjustment and you are good to go! Having had these in my humidors for a couple of weeks alongside my other digital hygrometers I can say that they seem to perform as well as both the Angelo and Western’s.

So all in all a bit of a hygrometer bargain, I am currently very impressed!!

Link to Hygrometer on Amazon

Hygrometer Calibration

I now have a number of humidors and a number of hygrometers. Most humidors come with the analogue type of hygrometer. I have pretty much given up on theses, if you get one that’s correct then fine, but trying to calibrate them is generally an exercise in futility.

Instead I have moved to digital hygrometers, I have reviewed them in the past, and I have now picked up a couple of Western Caliber IV hygrometers which have the advantage of being adjustable, and are now my preferred choice (they also arrived as I found out with their calibration spot on !)

 

In the past to calibrate hygrometers I have used the Salt Test, I am not going to go through the process here, as there are great web tutorials, and there is nothing wrong with calibration using salt (although some digital hygrometer manufacturers do not recommend it, I know salt is corrosive but I cant see an issue). However I have found a far simpler, if not quite so cheap way to do it.

I have switched to using Boveda Calibration Kits, these are just ridiculously simple to use. Open the kit slide in your hygrometers, wait 24 hours, adjust you hygrometer if they don’t read 75 or 76 (or note the difference if you cant adjust your hygrometer). Best of all if the gel pack is not dry you can use it again…

Here are my hygrometers in the pack

As you can see the Western’s were spot on.

For the £2.99 this kit cost me, I dont think I would calibrate using the salt test again.

 

 

Review: XIKAR Crystal Clear Humidifier

Rather than a cigar review tonight I decided to review a new addition to my humidor.

Having talked to a number of people I seem to have been quite lucky in that I have been able to regulate the humidity in both my humidors pretty successfully using normal humidifiers and humidifier solution. I think partly this is because pretty early on I found out the hard way that the large humidifier blocks that seem to ship with a lot of humidors are often too large, and its difficult to stop the humidity getting way beyond 70%, then the next time you look its below 65%.

I decided to replace the large humidifier blocks with a number of smaller long humidifiers, this allowed me to better control the humidity, it also saved a bit of space.

Whilst these worked well, in my new humidor because it is quite tall, and does not have any trays, I wanted to find something that could humidify the entire humidor, but take up as little space as possible. After some research I decided to give the XIKAR crystals a go.

This single small 4oz jar is large enough to humidify my 150 cigar humidor, and it occupies a lot less space than more traditional humidifiers. It uses crystals that you need to “top” up from time to time with a special fluid when the level of the crystals drops below a certain point. Admittedly you do need to use the fluid from XIKAR so you have tied yourself into the company, but so far these crystals are keeping my 150 count humidor at a steady 67% so I am really pleased.

I have had the XIKAR crystals in the humidor for around 4 weeks now and the humidity is rock solid, so for me these have been a great buy. If you have problems regulating the humidity in your humidor then I would recommend you give these a go.

New Humidor

Just a quick post today, to show you the new humidor that was delivered. I already have a nice little humidor, but it can only really store 25-30 cigars. I am going on a trip soon to the USA and I am planning to bring back a few sticks from my trip (as many as I can lol), well at US prices I would be a fool not too.

However it became obvious that my currently humidor would not be able to store the cigars I already have and those I am planning to bring back, I also wanted to start laying some down in the humidor and ageing them a little.

So I decided to find a larger humidor that I could use to store my USA haul, and lay some cigars down for ageing, in the end I got a great bargain from eBay which should hold around 80 – 100 cigars, so should be just what I need.

Review: Angelo Digital Hygrometer

A hygrometer is an essential piece of kit for your humidor, without one you cannot know the humidity in your humidor, and you cannot store your precious cigars in the correct conditions.

Most humidors, especially budget ones come with an analogue hygrometer, and on all but the most expensive humidors you get a very cheap and relatively poor quality analogue hygrometer.

The one that came with my humidor was very tricky to set-up, I did the salt test to calibrate it, but found that I just could not get the hygrometer to stay where I set it. After struggling for a while and probably not storing my cigars in ideal conditions, I decided I needed to replace the hygrometer.

My hygrometer was built into my humidor, the problem I had is that the only hygrometers I could find that would fit the mounting were other cheap hygrometers. In the end after reading various articles on the Internet I decided to get a digital hygrometer.

As with most things the cost of digital hygrometers varies a lot, most of the hygrometers I found were between 25 and 35 pounds, then I found the Angelo hygrometer.

This hygrometer can be purchased from ebay, and if you shop around you can get it for around 12 pounds plus delivery, of 15 with free delivery. Always one for a bargain I decided to give it a go and ordered one.

I am happy to say that this little hygrometer is very good, it is very simple, it shows temperature in Centigrade or Fahrenheit, and humidity in percentage. It is quite small, has a very handy little fold out stand, and records minimum and maximum values. The meter needs no calibration as its comes pre-calibrated.

I was worried about how accurate this little hygrometer would be, but after calibrating it using the salt test for 12 hours the hygrometer read 76%, so it was only 1% out, I repeated the test on a couple of occasions and it read exactly the same, so was good to go out of the box.

As you cannot calibrate this hygrometer, if it did read an incorrect value, then you can easily record the offset, so if it reads 78 during the salt test, you know it always reads 3% high and adjust accordingly, however I would be surprised if you need to do this.

All in all this is a great little cheap hygrometer.