Hi all,
A few months ago the wife and I decided to reno the basement of our home. This has provided us with a much better laid out space, so I decided it was time to go further down the rabbit hole and started really expanding my cigar collection, primarily for two reasons. One was to have more immediate “smokeable” cigars on hand. The other was to further my long-term storage collection. For the past 8 years I’ve been using a wine cooler (wineador) to store all my cigars. Generally speaking, I’ve never had an issue with RH using heartfelt beads in their tubes. Through what was probably neglect on my part not checking as often as I should, I did wind up with a very very minor mould problem once, but otherwise (finger crossed), I’ve never had a serious issue with the wineador.
Anyways, based on the renos we were doing, the wineador wasn’t going to cut it anymore in terms of aesthetics. So I took the opportunity to pick out a more furniture-esque humidor. I’ve always been very, very happy with my wineador and how it’s performed for me, especially since I got fairly lazy with it and have let it go for weeks without checking or opening it. That being said, I personally prefer a real wood humidor with Spanish cedar. I prefer the smell, I prefer the look, I prefer the wood’s ability to absorb moisture, etc etc. Again, I’ll be really clear that my wineador served me damn near PERFECTLY and I’m certainly not advocating for anyone not to use one. But simply put, my personal preference is wood and at this point in life in the home, it’s what I need to go with.
So I ordered up this unit:
I was super excited to get it in (had to wait a couple weeks for shipping, as I live in a more rural area). When it arrived, I unpacked it, examined for damage and when all was deemed good, back in the box it went until the home renos were completed. Fast forward to about a month later. Excitedly like a small child on Christmas, I cleaned out the inside of the new humidor and got ready to season it. I’ve never seasoned anything this size, so I figured I would do active as well as passive seasoning. I filled up my new Cigar Oasis (CO) Plus, got a shot glass of distilled water, put them both into the humidor along with a hygrometer and started the process. The ambient RH in the home was ~45% at the time, so the humidor had a long way to go. 6 days later, I was up to 55% RH. This was pretty much with the CO running nearly non-stop (80% of the time on, 20% off). I was getting a little worried at this point - the wineador never took this long to get RH up..... So I figured it must be because the wood was super dry, so I needed to give it more time. 5 days later, I’m up to 60% RH, hooray ! After that I lost the exact count of days but it was roughly another week after that and I got it up to 62% RH. Since my target is 65%, I figured I just about made it. But I was still worried. Something wasn’t right. My CO was still running nearly non-stop and I was filling it at least every other day. My heart sank as I knew what the issue was weeks prior, but I just didn’t want to admit it…. The seals on this humidor weren’t working properly…..
I decided to stop attempting this seasoning and take a much closer look at the humidor. Here’s some background about me. I live in an area where the RH can get VERY low in the winter. When it gets to -60 degrees F (yes, that’s MINUS sixty degrees), the RH outdoors can drop down to 15-20%. This causes the humidity in the air inside a home to immediately get sucked out like a vacuum, through every air crack and poorly insulated window. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture, but when it dips down this cold, you actually get ice buildup on the inside of your home’s windows. Even worse in bathrooms when you take hot showers. Anyways, my point is, if I could barely get to my target RH of 65% (when in reality it should not be any issue to get to the industry standard of 70%) during the fall, how was this humidor going to react in the dead of winter ? I didn’t want to chance my growing collection to that.
So, I decided to see what I could do about this seal issue. Before I go into my solutions and learnings, let me first say that even though I don’t own an “American made” humidor and I have never seen one in person, I have great respect for those that take time with the craft and manufacture quality products. This Chinese-made piece of crap is, well, a piece of crap. When I inspected the humidor a lot closer, I found that the build quality is complete garbage. There were air gaps where joints should be flush and tight. The door not only didn’t hold the “dollar bill test” very well, it actually didn’t hold it at ALL (the money simply fell to the ground when let go). And the drawer might as well have not been there when doing the flashlight test. This Chinese-made crap shows no craftsmanship at all and while it was somewhat affordable, I certainly understand why one would pay more for a handmade, American humidor. At some point I do fully intend to purchase one of those, but it just isn’t in the cards right now.
OK, as mentioned above, the humidor pretty much failed every humidity-leakage test I’ve read about. Dollar bill test. Flashlight test. Visual inspection for gaps test. You name it, it failed it. So, what to do ? Well, the very first thing I did was buy some weather stripping foam from the local hardware store. The roll was $5.95. I decided to put the weather stripping foam on the humidor’s side vs on the door / drawer, simply because I figured it would be less likely to move or shift that way since it would always be on the stationary part of the humidor. You can see the pictures of this application below:
This looks pretty simple, but it’s actually not. You need to line the foam up juuuuuuuuuuuuuuust perfectly. If you place the foam too far towards the outside, then you’re creating a larger air gap because the door doesn’t close as tightly as it should (because of physical resistance from the foam). If you put it too far towards the inside, the foam won’t be touching the door when you close it, defeating the entire purpose. Again, seems simple, but lining that up perfectly takes some time. There was one section I had to do about 4 times, simply because I couldn’t get it lined up properly.
Thinking that this was where most of the humidity was being lost, I started re-seasoning the humidor. After 2 days however, despite easily getting to above 60% RH already, I got skeptical with myself and started looking on the back of the humidor, and underneath. Low and behold, I found more air gaps, this time in joints. Quite frankly, this is absolutely unacceptable. These joints should be nearly airtight, period. There is no reason why there should be air gaps here. I should have checked this all out earlier, but you know, I was hoping the fix would be quick and not such a PITA. Back to the hardware store and picked up aquarium & food safe silicone (stuff is hard to find, seriously). I started with underneath the humidor. The following are pictures of the underside (A (you’ll see these reference letters at the very bottom of this post)). I was not too concerned about how the silicone would look here, since this is the bottom of the humidor and no one would ever see it. In the rest of the pictures that follow, the green circles and arrows indicate areas where I applied silicone:
Basically I created a bead around the entire bottom of the humidor where the joints are. I honestly don’t suspect that I was losing a lot of humidity out the bottom but since I was going to be siliconing elsewhere anyways and underneath is never going to be visible to anyone when the humidor is upright, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to run a bead and seal it up good.
Next was the door (B). The door has 2 aspects to it, the inner joint between cedar frame and glass, and the outer joint between the cedar frame which creates the seal with the humidor itself (this is where the door frame touches the newly applied weather stripping foam). I chose to seal both the inner and outer joints, as I have read quite a bit about how glass can be a huge potential for humidity leakage.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, aesthetics matter to me. I found out pretty quickly that applying silicone changes the visible darkness of the Spanish cedar. Almost like I was applying a coloured stain to bare wood. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the case, but I did anticipate it. I don’t want to ruin the aesthetic value of the humidor, otherwise it’s worthless to me, so I kept the siliconing as much as possible to places that you wouldn’t be able to see unless the door / drawer was open. The idea was that if the humidor was closed (like it will be for ~95% of its life), you wouldn’t be able to tell that I went all willy-nilly with the silicone tube. So, in most places where I applied the silicone, I wound up wiping the bead with my finger. This did two things. It forcefully pushed the silicone into the joint, and also spread it to cover the entire surface of that particular side of the cedar. This way, I didn’t wind up with a side of cedar that looks “splotchy”, for lack of a better term. This kind of worked out, but keep in mind that I’m not a professional siliconer….. Anyways, on to the door pictures:
Finally, on the top glass and the drawer (C). The drawer is the worst part of this humidor. Out of the factory when I got the humidor, the drawer was basically seal-less. None. Nadda. Zero seal. I applied weather stripping foam just like the door, and that helped somewhat. However, it was apparent that silicone was also going to be needed here, and even then, the drawer is where I will always lose humidity. The poor construction of how it sits against the humidor is uneven. As well, it does not have enough weight and there is no magnet that keeps it “snug” against the humidor when closed. All of this combined means that it will ALWAYS leak humidity and I will have to accept that. Anyways, back to my sealing efforts. First image you’re going to see one of the examples of where there was literally a straight air gap in the joint between the top of the humidor and the side. This gap was large enough to shove a Tylenol pill through. This isn’t some interior shelf piece. This isn’t some part of the drawer. This is the TOP and SIDE of the humidor itself. Again, absolutely appalling craftsmanship. Next image is the underside of the top of the drawer. So think of the top of the humidor, just looking at it from underneath up. Again, something you won’t ever see whether the humidor is open or closed, so I wasn’t too concerned about the beautification of my siliconing. The final two images are of the joints between the sides of the humidor and the top, on the inside, above the drawer on either side of it (image is upside down). In this instance, the joint gap was so large that I didn’t have to worry about using my finger to force the silicone in or make it look aesthetically pleasing. A slow and steady bead of silicone out of the tube made a fine job of filling that gap as well as aesthetically coming out very clean. The very last image is a close up of that bead.
For reference, I named the three main locations of my efforts A, B and C, as you can see in brackets in the above paragraphs. Here is an image of the locations I’m talking about in those respective places:
I let the silicone cure for just over 1 week, because I’m paranoid and I still had my wineador, so I was in no huge rush to get the new end table humidor up and running. Silicone stinks and that smell can take a while to go away. While the silicone is SUPPOSED to be cured within 24 hours (and, admittedly, it did stop smelling after a day), better to give it more time and be safe. My train of thought is that once you load up a humidor with cigars, you generally won't be airing it out that much, so any minuscule amount of silicone smell left will be trapped inside the humidor. Not good for your sticks !
That took a lot longer to write than I was anticipating ! The point of this thread is to help anyone else who happens to purchase one of these Chinese-made crap humidors. They look nice, they’re somewhat affordable, but they’re really a piece of crap. Knowing what I know now, the FIRST thing I would do if I bought another one would be to silicone and weather strip right off the bat before trying to season it. I think if I had known this and been able to do it beforehand, I would be less pissed off about the craftsmanship and build quality. There’s nothing more frustrating than purchasing something, trying to use it and then realizing that you actually need to do some “fixing” before it’s usable. Again, maybe just me, but I would have felt better doing all this seal-prep before my first seasoning attempt.
For reference, over the next several days / weeks I re-seasoned the humidor and easily got to 70%+. From there I let it come down in the ~65% range and loaded it up with cigars. Then, as every B/SOTL knows, I ran out of room again. I'll leave it at that as I have another thread to write about seasoning the NEXT humidor
Thanks for reading !
A few months ago the wife and I decided to reno the basement of our home. This has provided us with a much better laid out space, so I decided it was time to go further down the rabbit hole and started really expanding my cigar collection, primarily for two reasons. One was to have more immediate “smokeable” cigars on hand. The other was to further my long-term storage collection. For the past 8 years I’ve been using a wine cooler (wineador) to store all my cigars. Generally speaking, I’ve never had an issue with RH using heartfelt beads in their tubes. Through what was probably neglect on my part not checking as often as I should, I did wind up with a very very minor mould problem once, but otherwise (finger crossed), I’ve never had a serious issue with the wineador.
Anyways, based on the renos we were doing, the wineador wasn’t going to cut it anymore in terms of aesthetics. So I took the opportunity to pick out a more furniture-esque humidor. I’ve always been very, very happy with my wineador and how it’s performed for me, especially since I got fairly lazy with it and have let it go for weeks without checking or opening it. That being said, I personally prefer a real wood humidor with Spanish cedar. I prefer the smell, I prefer the look, I prefer the wood’s ability to absorb moisture, etc etc. Again, I’ll be really clear that my wineador served me damn near PERFECTLY and I’m certainly not advocating for anyone not to use one. But simply put, my personal preference is wood and at this point in life in the home, it’s what I need to go with.
So I ordered up this unit:
I was super excited to get it in (had to wait a couple weeks for shipping, as I live in a more rural area). When it arrived, I unpacked it, examined for damage and when all was deemed good, back in the box it went until the home renos were completed. Fast forward to about a month later. Excitedly like a small child on Christmas, I cleaned out the inside of the new humidor and got ready to season it. I’ve never seasoned anything this size, so I figured I would do active as well as passive seasoning. I filled up my new Cigar Oasis (CO) Plus, got a shot glass of distilled water, put them both into the humidor along with a hygrometer and started the process. The ambient RH in the home was ~45% at the time, so the humidor had a long way to go. 6 days later, I was up to 55% RH. This was pretty much with the CO running nearly non-stop (80% of the time on, 20% off). I was getting a little worried at this point - the wineador never took this long to get RH up..... So I figured it must be because the wood was super dry, so I needed to give it more time. 5 days later, I’m up to 60% RH, hooray ! After that I lost the exact count of days but it was roughly another week after that and I got it up to 62% RH. Since my target is 65%, I figured I just about made it. But I was still worried. Something wasn’t right. My CO was still running nearly non-stop and I was filling it at least every other day. My heart sank as I knew what the issue was weeks prior, but I just didn’t want to admit it…. The seals on this humidor weren’t working properly…..
I decided to stop attempting this seasoning and take a much closer look at the humidor. Here’s some background about me. I live in an area where the RH can get VERY low in the winter. When it gets to -60 degrees F (yes, that’s MINUS sixty degrees), the RH outdoors can drop down to 15-20%. This causes the humidity in the air inside a home to immediately get sucked out like a vacuum, through every air crack and poorly insulated window. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture, but when it dips down this cold, you actually get ice buildup on the inside of your home’s windows. Even worse in bathrooms when you take hot showers. Anyways, my point is, if I could barely get to my target RH of 65% (when in reality it should not be any issue to get to the industry standard of 70%) during the fall, how was this humidor going to react in the dead of winter ? I didn’t want to chance my growing collection to that.
So, I decided to see what I could do about this seal issue. Before I go into my solutions and learnings, let me first say that even though I don’t own an “American made” humidor and I have never seen one in person, I have great respect for those that take time with the craft and manufacture quality products. This Chinese-made piece of crap is, well, a piece of crap. When I inspected the humidor a lot closer, I found that the build quality is complete garbage. There were air gaps where joints should be flush and tight. The door not only didn’t hold the “dollar bill test” very well, it actually didn’t hold it at ALL (the money simply fell to the ground when let go). And the drawer might as well have not been there when doing the flashlight test. This Chinese-made crap shows no craftsmanship at all and while it was somewhat affordable, I certainly understand why one would pay more for a handmade, American humidor. At some point I do fully intend to purchase one of those, but it just isn’t in the cards right now.
OK, as mentioned above, the humidor pretty much failed every humidity-leakage test I’ve read about. Dollar bill test. Flashlight test. Visual inspection for gaps test. You name it, it failed it. So, what to do ? Well, the very first thing I did was buy some weather stripping foam from the local hardware store. The roll was $5.95. I decided to put the weather stripping foam on the humidor’s side vs on the door / drawer, simply because I figured it would be less likely to move or shift that way since it would always be on the stationary part of the humidor. You can see the pictures of this application below:
This looks pretty simple, but it’s actually not. You need to line the foam up juuuuuuuuuuuuuuust perfectly. If you place the foam too far towards the outside, then you’re creating a larger air gap because the door doesn’t close as tightly as it should (because of physical resistance from the foam). If you put it too far towards the inside, the foam won’t be touching the door when you close it, defeating the entire purpose. Again, seems simple, but lining that up perfectly takes some time. There was one section I had to do about 4 times, simply because I couldn’t get it lined up properly.
Thinking that this was where most of the humidity was being lost, I started re-seasoning the humidor. After 2 days however, despite easily getting to above 60% RH already, I got skeptical with myself and started looking on the back of the humidor, and underneath. Low and behold, I found more air gaps, this time in joints. Quite frankly, this is absolutely unacceptable. These joints should be nearly airtight, period. There is no reason why there should be air gaps here. I should have checked this all out earlier, but you know, I was hoping the fix would be quick and not such a PITA. Back to the hardware store and picked up aquarium & food safe silicone (stuff is hard to find, seriously). I started with underneath the humidor. The following are pictures of the underside (A (you’ll see these reference letters at the very bottom of this post)). I was not too concerned about how the silicone would look here, since this is the bottom of the humidor and no one would ever see it. In the rest of the pictures that follow, the green circles and arrows indicate areas where I applied silicone:
Basically I created a bead around the entire bottom of the humidor where the joints are. I honestly don’t suspect that I was losing a lot of humidity out the bottom but since I was going to be siliconing elsewhere anyways and underneath is never going to be visible to anyone when the humidor is upright, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to run a bead and seal it up good.
Next was the door (B). The door has 2 aspects to it, the inner joint between cedar frame and glass, and the outer joint between the cedar frame which creates the seal with the humidor itself (this is where the door frame touches the newly applied weather stripping foam). I chose to seal both the inner and outer joints, as I have read quite a bit about how glass can be a huge potential for humidity leakage.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, aesthetics matter to me. I found out pretty quickly that applying silicone changes the visible darkness of the Spanish cedar. Almost like I was applying a coloured stain to bare wood. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the case, but I did anticipate it. I don’t want to ruin the aesthetic value of the humidor, otherwise it’s worthless to me, so I kept the siliconing as much as possible to places that you wouldn’t be able to see unless the door / drawer was open. The idea was that if the humidor was closed (like it will be for ~95% of its life), you wouldn’t be able to tell that I went all willy-nilly with the silicone tube. So, in most places where I applied the silicone, I wound up wiping the bead with my finger. This did two things. It forcefully pushed the silicone into the joint, and also spread it to cover the entire surface of that particular side of the cedar. This way, I didn’t wind up with a side of cedar that looks “splotchy”, for lack of a better term. This kind of worked out, but keep in mind that I’m not a professional siliconer….. Anyways, on to the door pictures:
Finally, on the top glass and the drawer (C). The drawer is the worst part of this humidor. Out of the factory when I got the humidor, the drawer was basically seal-less. None. Nadda. Zero seal. I applied weather stripping foam just like the door, and that helped somewhat. However, it was apparent that silicone was also going to be needed here, and even then, the drawer is where I will always lose humidity. The poor construction of how it sits against the humidor is uneven. As well, it does not have enough weight and there is no magnet that keeps it “snug” against the humidor when closed. All of this combined means that it will ALWAYS leak humidity and I will have to accept that. Anyways, back to my sealing efforts. First image you’re going to see one of the examples of where there was literally a straight air gap in the joint between the top of the humidor and the side. This gap was large enough to shove a Tylenol pill through. This isn’t some interior shelf piece. This isn’t some part of the drawer. This is the TOP and SIDE of the humidor itself. Again, absolutely appalling craftsmanship. Next image is the underside of the top of the drawer. So think of the top of the humidor, just looking at it from underneath up. Again, something you won’t ever see whether the humidor is open or closed, so I wasn’t too concerned about the beautification of my siliconing. The final two images are of the joints between the sides of the humidor and the top, on the inside, above the drawer on either side of it (image is upside down). In this instance, the joint gap was so large that I didn’t have to worry about using my finger to force the silicone in or make it look aesthetically pleasing. A slow and steady bead of silicone out of the tube made a fine job of filling that gap as well as aesthetically coming out very clean. The very last image is a close up of that bead.
For reference, I named the three main locations of my efforts A, B and C, as you can see in brackets in the above paragraphs. Here is an image of the locations I’m talking about in those respective places:
I let the silicone cure for just over 1 week, because I’m paranoid and I still had my wineador, so I was in no huge rush to get the new end table humidor up and running. Silicone stinks and that smell can take a while to go away. While the silicone is SUPPOSED to be cured within 24 hours (and, admittedly, it did stop smelling after a day), better to give it more time and be safe. My train of thought is that once you load up a humidor with cigars, you generally won't be airing it out that much, so any minuscule amount of silicone smell left will be trapped inside the humidor. Not good for your sticks !
That took a lot longer to write than I was anticipating ! The point of this thread is to help anyone else who happens to purchase one of these Chinese-made crap humidors. They look nice, they’re somewhat affordable, but they’re really a piece of crap. Knowing what I know now, the FIRST thing I would do if I bought another one would be to silicone and weather strip right off the bat before trying to season it. I think if I had known this and been able to do it beforehand, I would be less pissed off about the craftsmanship and build quality. There’s nothing more frustrating than purchasing something, trying to use it and then realizing that you actually need to do some “fixing” before it’s usable. Again, maybe just me, but I would have felt better doing all this seal-prep before my first seasoning attempt.
For reference, over the next several days / weeks I re-seasoned the humidor and easily got to 70%+. From there I let it come down in the ~65% range and loaded it up with cigars. Then, as every B/SOTL knows, I ran out of room again. I'll leave it at that as I have another thread to write about seasoning the NEXT humidor
Thanks for reading !
