I have begun to delve a little into what I call micro analysis of humidor performance. I can't expect it to really excite anyone but me, but there is a certain amount of pleasure derived from making something work, making it work better and trying achieve perfection. It is interesting to see if an idea that you have will really turn into something that you will consider as a standardized design or whether it is a failure.
This is the same humidor on two different days with similar temperatures (outside). My goal was to try to shallow the dehydration during cooling above the 80 dF ambient mark and see if I can decrease the frequency or the amplitude of the cycle. Every improvement must do one or both of those things or it is not an improvement!
These are high magnification pics of the humidity oscillation due to refrigeration at a high temperature (ambient outside). Any of these very small dips are acceptable to me, but if I could pull them down to as little as 3 rH I would really be pleased. At 80 dF outside, I don't really think it is possible but it does not stop me from trying!
Test A is a native process. Cooling cycle begins and hydration follows. The cooling cycle is run until completion and there is residual drying that initiates subsequent hydration cycles. Pretty straight forward.
Test B on the other hand was an idea I had about interrupting the cooling cycle when the system called for hydration and then once the system was hydrated again the cooling cycle would resume. This would drag out the cooling cycle, and perhaps over cool, but it would theoretically reduce the large dips in the rH to smaller ones. In cooler weather the system would be unaffected by the design.
I am intrigued as to how it works and if I distort the chart to show the dehydration cycles highly compressed with the amplitudes exaggerated it looks like it does work quite well. I will crop some charts and run some analysis on them to look at the average rH, as well as average highs and lows to be sure.
Thanks for following. -R