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. Its excise worksheet works out each month's tax on cigars bought untaxed from the deliveries you receive, with the per-cigar maximum, as a CSV or in the FTA uniformity column order: open the sample shop and pick Excise. A locker manager is being built next and is not in Ashbook yet. More about Ashbook.
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