How to Set Up and Maintain a Humidor
How to Set Up and Maintain a Humidor
PUBLISHED: JUNE-19-2019
WARNING: If you haven’t seasoned your humidor yet, DON’T ADD YOUR CIGARS YET.
Now that you have your humidor season, it is time to get your humidor to the ideal humidity and temperature. Having the ideal humidor humidity will keep your cigars delicious for a long time while preventing tobacco beetles. Keep reading to learn what temperature and humidity to keep your humidor and how to maintain that after seasoning.
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The Best Humidity for Cigars
The rule of thumb everyone will tell you is a 70% relative humidity (RH) and 70°F is the best cigar humidity. You will see this called the 70/70 rule. If you have one of NewAir’s Opti-Temp™ humidors, read no further!
Not all humidors have the ability to heat and cool to ensure the perfect temperature year round. If that sounds like you or you want to learn about other cigar preferences, read on.
For temperature conditions that fluctuate throughout the year, you will want to be able to track temp/humidity level to know when you have to make changes. When the temp starts to rise, you’ll want to lower the RH. The opposite is true when it starts getting colder.
Advanced tips: A higher RH will soften your cigars and can cause burn problems. A lower RH will make your cigars will feel a bit firmer. Be careful, too low of a temperature and humidity will eventually ruin your cigars, causing them to be too dry, and even cause tobacco beetles. Lastly, high end cigars and cigars with thick wrappers, like Cubans or Dominicans, say that they fare better at a lower RH, closer to around 65%. This is most likely due to the higher amount of oils in the wrapper leaf.
Due to this, some long-time cigar smokers prefer to keep their humidor as low as 65 degrees F with 67% RH. Feel free to gradually play around with the temp and RH to get the perfect burn and feel from your cigars. Try to keep your humidor below 73°F (23°C) and between 65-74% RH though.
How to keep a humidor at 70 degrees
With the information you just gained, we can finish how to properly set up a humidor. We have had our NewAir humidor independently tested to take the guesswork out of it for you. The testing were done with Boveda 69% RH 60g humidity bags.
Test results show you will need three for our 250 cigar capacity humidors (CC-100H and CC-100) and six for our 400 cigar capacity humidors (CC300 and CC-300H).
Maintenance Instructions
- Place unwrapped Boveda 69% humidity bags in your cigar humidor
- Add your cigar collection. Note: Boveda is safe to touch your cigars.
- Close the humidor, you are finished
Boveda humidity packs last 2-3 months so be sure to keep a close eye on the humidity of your humidor after a couple of months.
The process will be similar for none Boveda humidification devices like green foam, gel, pillow, beads and electronic humidifiers. Get the correct RH humidifier product and add to your humidor as the package instructs.
Humidifier options come is plenty of different forms. Each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Green foam
- Inexpensive
- Needs to be refilled often and not very accurate
Gel
- Easy to use, inexpensive, accurate & last a while
- Container can be awkward
Beads
- Inexpensive, accurate & last a while
- Not easy to know when their dry
Electronic
- Accurate and easy to use
- Expensive, noisy, & takes up space in the humidor
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