Humidifying a cheese cave

Dear John,

I am writing to see if you could help me out with a project I am working on.

I am working to get the humidity in my cheese cave (a root cellar that I use to age my cheese in) to 90% humidity while at the same time keeping a temperature of 55 degrees.

The temperature of the room likes to keep around 67 degrees and 90% humidity (8 months out of the year, we live in upstate NY) so I installed an air cooling system which takes the air down to 55 degrees however in doing so takes humidity out of the air dropping the humidity to 65%. The cooling system runs on average 16 hours out of a 24 hour day during the summer.

I think I need to recycle the water that is coming out of the air cooling system and put it back into the air to keep the humidity at 90%. 

Right now I am collecting it into a bucket on the floor. I have tried varies ways of getting the humidity back into the air but none have worked yet and I would like to create a closed loop system where I do not have to be manually filling two humidifiers everyday to keep the humidity level at 85%. 

I am thinking what could work is collecting the water from the cooling system and using a steam maker with around 700ml/hr capacity and blowing it towards the other side of the room. Do you have equipment that you think could solve my problem?

The room is 8 feet wide by 8 feet tall and 10 feet long. 

Thanks,

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Hi Calvin, 

Good to hear from you.

I would personally use our humidistat to control the humidity in your cheese cave. That way you won't have to worry at all about it. 

If you want to only use the water from the ac, and not use a humidistat, I would probably use the mist maker without a float, and just set it in the bottom of the bucket. This way, as soon as the water level is high enough, the mister will kick on until it fogs out the water coming in.  my one concern would be that it would stutter because the water is coming in so slow, and the mister would probably outrun the water coming in.  You could just let the fan run constantly, so whenever the fogger kicks on, it'll push the fog out into the room. The fan I would use is our 120mm waterproof fan with speed controller. 

Whichever you choose, if you want to push the fog to the other side of the room, I would run a piece of 2" PVC to the other side. Just make sure it has a slight slope towards the fogger, so any fog that condensates in the tube will run back into the bucket. 

Regarding 700ml/hr.... our single discs do around 500ml/hr, and our 3 discs use about 1500. You could use the single disc, and run it all day, or go with the 3 disc. In my opinion, I would think the single disc unit would be too small to meet the requirements you need to make 90%. 

Hope that all made sense!

Regards, 

john