Shop humidity

On the podcasts I listen to the guys often refer to the ambient humidity in their shops. Namibia being a fairly dry country, but with a definitive rainy season would have quite a dramatic shift in humidity between summer and winter I thought. The question is how much and exactly what is happening in my shop?

The reason why I first thought about recording this was when I heard this one guy (can not remember who) suggest that one should consider building one wooden plane for winter and one for summer to cut down on the amount of tuning that needs to be done secondary to wood movement. I am currently in the process of research and information collection before embarking upon a wooden plane building spree.

I thought I should therefore start to collect data on the changes in humidity in my shop. In the pictures below you will see the small electronic device I use to record the temperature and humidity. It is able to record the current, maximum and minimum for both humidity and temperature.

I record the maximum and minimum each time I am in the shop on the chart pictured. Once in a while I would then enter this data into a database I have built using Filemaker. The database then calculates the averages for whatever time frame you are interested in, be that a month, a season or a year. Of course I first need to collect a year’s data to do the latter.

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Temperatue and humidity chart

 

 

I might write a very brief post from time to time reporting on the actual humidity trends in the shop. So far I found the following:

March 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 24.7°C Average Maximum Temperature 30.2°C Average Minimum Humidity 21.5% Average Maximum Humidity 34.4%

April 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 17.9°C Average Maximum Temperature 25.6°C Average Minimum Humidity 29.6% Average Maximum Humidity 44.3%

May 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 15.6°C Average Maximum Temperature 22.5°C Average Minimum Humidity 28.4% Average Maximum Humidity 36%

15/1/2015

I did not manage to record any data in 2014, so one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to get back into the habit. I did however manage to enter the data for the rest of 2013 in order to calculate the averages.

June 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 12.4°C Average Maximum Temperature 18.6°C Average Minimum Humidity 31.3% Average Maximum Humidity 35.6%

July 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 11.7°C Average Maximum Temperature 19.5°C Average Minimum Humidity 31% Average Maximum Humidity 35.5%

August 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 13°C Average Maximum Temperature 22.2°C Average Minimum Humidity 28.2% Average Maximum Humidity 34.7%

September 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 14.7°C Average Maximum Temperature 25°C Average Minimum Humidity 28.1% Average Maximum Humidity 39.9%

October 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 21°C Average Maximum Temperature 29°C Average Minimum Humidity 23.3% Average Maximum Humidity 31.2%

November 2013 – Average Minimum Temperature 22.1°C Average Maximum Temperature 30.6°C Average Minimum Humidity 23.2% Average Maximum Humidity 37.1%