Where do you keep your Cooler? Actually a ? about, is the garage/shop OK?
FireRob
Everyone, Registered Users Posts: 1,884
Curious where do you all keep your cooler? I might have one place to keep my new project but the wife might (OK, without a doubt she will) think differently about it. I don’t really have any closets that are an option. My humidors are in the only place the wife will allow and have filled that area up already.
My only other option and the place I would actually like to keep them is in my shop. It’s not climate controlled and hardly insulated and gets very hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I am guessing the inside of the cooler will as well, as the temp fluctuates? (yea that is kind of obvious) How important do you place the importance of the temperature of your cigars? Thinking I already know the answer to this given all the talk about temperature controlled Wineador’s.
May just have to try a little harder to find a place inside the house the wife wont object to. Main reason for asking is to see if anyone has had luck keeping their cool-a-dor’s in a garage type place.
My only other option and the place I would actually like to keep them is in my shop. It’s not climate controlled and hardly insulated and gets very hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I am guessing the inside of the cooler will as well, as the temp fluctuates? (yea that is kind of obvious) How important do you place the importance of the temperature of your cigars? Thinking I already know the answer to this given all the talk about temperature controlled Wineador’s.
May just have to try a little harder to find a place inside the house the wife wont object to. Main reason for asking is to see if anyone has had luck keeping their cool-a-dor’s in a garage type place.
Comments
I can't remember who it was but I know they wanted to store the cigars in an uninsulated/fluctuating temp area similar to the conditions you're describing. (Or maybe I'm just going crazy and making this up)
Dang, if that poster is still active maybe they'll read this and reply & tell you how their experience is/was.....
Or someone else can remember that conversation and bump it up.
+1
The way I see it ....
Yes, the cigars may be fine and you may not have a problem ..... but will you worry about them going "bad", will you "stress about it"?
Think about worse case scenario - the smokes get ruined and you have to toss them all out....would you be ok with that and be willing to "start over".
Some people probably wouldn't think twice about the temp/humidity fluctuations and just smoke the cigars all the same --- and if they had to toss the cigars and get new ones it would be no big deal.
But for me --- heck no I'd be stressed out pulling out all my hair worrying about the smokes....but then again my wife tells me I have OCD, so maybe that has something to do with it LOL
I did post a question about it here and I'll try and find the thread. There was some good points made.
http://www.cigar.com/cs/forums/thread/706295.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/Lifoam-4943-Glacier-Reusable-ounces/dp/B001MUK0HA/ref=pd_sim_hg_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0TS1T2TW39KMTXXWVHSQ
So the basic question would be: Aside from beetles, are higher temps (80 and 90 or even 95) OK for cigar storage? Or to put it another way, Is 70 degrees better than 85 or 90 for any reason other that avoiding beetles?
Every storage guideline I've ever found online has mentioned beetles as the reason to avoid higher storage temps. But I have never read that higher storage temps wold be OK if proper freezing is used beforehand. Like I said, I trust that you are right but are there any more sources that back up this assertion? I just want to be sure. In my case specifically, I have frozen about 2/3rds of my stock and would consider keeping those specific sticks in a warmer invironment due to lack of space available to keep my coolers indoors.
Bob if you research the mortality rates and speeds for tobacco beetles versus freezing temperatures, somewhere you can find a nice graph or chart showing exactly how long it takes to kill all the cycles of the beetle/larvae/egg at various low temperatures like 32F, 0F,-10Farenheit, etc. Basically using the chart you can determine your freezer temperature at home, and how long it would take (minimum) for the toughest-to-kill stage (which i believe is the eggs). So say your freezer gets to 0 farenheit and the chart shows it takes 36 hours to kill all three stages, you just add a safety factor [1.5, 2.0, 3.0, whatever factor makes you feel warm n fuzzy safe :-)] and decide you are going to freeze for say 5 days and have 100 percent confidence that any beetles/larvae/eggs that arrive in your cigars are dead when you take them out of the freezer.
Thus with isolation and freezing everything, you have 100% certainty your cigars will not hatch beetles. Now I'm not sure if its possible that they live in areas like pennsylvania and can get INTO your humis, but thats for another discussion.
sorry to thread jack this thread. So, I've started another thread with this question over in the cigar101 section.
Oh my mistake. I don't really think you have anything to worry about. The only other thing to keep in mind which most likely are aware of, is that obviously hotter air can hold more moisture, and obviously we're reading hygrometers in relative humidity. So while 68rh may be ok for you when you're used to storing cigars around 70, it may be beneficial to drop your rh to like 60 to 65 rh if you plan on storage at 90 Farenheit. As far as I know there is nothing else to worry about, but there is a lot I don't know about I'm sure.
Bob, you did not hijack this. Your questions were part of my concern. The temps here in my part of Texas get in excess of 100* very often. A year or two ago the DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) area set a new area record of 71 days over 100 degrees. It was 40 something consecutive days with a 5 day reprieve (meaning it was only a high of 99* those 5 days) and then another 20 something consecutive days with 100*+ temperatures. At night it might only cool off in the mid to lower 90’s. So if I kept my coolers of cigars in my shop the inside of that cooler could very well be 90*+. I will have to go check the thread you started in Cigar 101.