Humidor Monitoring for Cigar Shops
A walk-in humidor holds most of a shop's stock value in one room with one door. A failed humidifier or a hot weekend can do months of damage before anyone looks at a dial. Monitoring is cheap now. The work is placing sensors where conditions actually differ and deciding what should wake someone up.
Where to put sensors
- One per zone, not one per room: near the door, at the back wall, high and low on tall shelving. A walk-in can differ by several points of humidity from front to back.
- One in every display cabinet and locker section. They behave differently from the room.
- Away from the humidifier outlet and the cooling vent, which read the device, not the room.
Bluetooth or Wi-Fi
| Type | How readings reach you | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Bluetooth hygrometer | A phone nearby reads it; the phone keeps the reading | Cabinets and small humidors, checked daily |
| Wi-Fi hygrometer or Bluetooth with a gateway | The maker's cloud reads it around the clock | Walk-ins, overnight and weekend alerts |
| A device you build | Posts readings to an endpoint you choose | Shops that want their own hardware |
What should trigger an alert
Hold the humidity and temperature your shop has chosen, commonly around 65 to 70 percent and below about 70 °F. Alerts that are useful rather than noisy:
- Humidity outside your band for more than an hour, not a single reading after the door opened.
- Temperature above about 72 °F for a sustained period, which raises tobacco beetle risk.
- A sensor that has gone silent, which usually means a dead battery or a lost connection rather than a fine humidor.
Keep a climate log
A dated record of readings per zone is what an insurer asks for after a loss, and what a supplier asks for when a box arrives cracked. Keep at least a daily reading per zone, and keep the log longer than your policy's claim window.
Where Ashbook fits. Ashbook on the web keeps a shop's humidors, stock counted in sticks with boxes and singles, deliveries received and a climate log. It reads Bluetooth hygrometers through the phone app, Govee and SwitchBot Wi-Fi sensors through their clouds, and devices you build, and flags too dry, too wet, too warm and silent sensors. An excise worksheet built from received invoices and a locker manager are being built next and are not in Ashbook yet. More about Ashbook.
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