Do you have forced-air heating? Radiant? Do you lived in an apartment or a house?MKR wrote: ↑Sat Jan 16, 2021 7:45 pminteresting. I too have never given humidity any thought. especially since i have had zero issues with my guitars in the 10 years i have lived here. Still i am going to look into humidifiers i think. I don't even know what it a guitar humidifier looks like. We have humidifiers that we put in our kids' rooms when theyre sick but thats about all i know on the subject lol.
Also my epiphone acoustic is cheap, but it's not that cheap. Its an EJ-160 with a pickup and volume and tone knobs on the front of the body. Definitely feels like nice guitar in my hands. It has pretty much the same build characteristics as the martin (solid spruce top, laminate sides and back). It does have a thick coat of poly lacquer all over including the neck which is why the martin feels so 'naked' to me still.
Sometimes things like apartments or multi-unit buildings will have a central humidifier built into their furnace and you'll be receiving humidified air without realizing it.
Really tight modern buildings without an air exchanger running can also retain a lot of moisture in the winter.
Old, leaky single-family dwellings with forced-air furnaces are absurdly dry in Canadian winter, sometimes in the single-digit RH range.
My parents' home was one of those places that had a naturally higher RH without trying, and I grew up with a solid-top classical and acoustic that suffered no damage.
Then I moved to an apartment in an older, leaky building with forced-air heating and the very first winter, I had that Taylor split in half.
Getting an adjustable hygrometer like this one is invaluable in figuring out whether you need to be worrying or not.
You take a bottle cap, fill it with table salt, and drip just enough water onto it to make it a damp slurry without visible standing water. You then seal it for 12-24h in a ziploc or airtight tupperware container with your hygrometer. A salt slurry will stabilize at exactly 75% RH. Your hygrometer will likely read something different. Make note of that difference, and when you open up the bag, there's a little button you can hit on the back that lets you compensate for that difference. I.e. if it was reading 71% in the ziploc, you follow the instructions for adding +4% to the calibration.
You can now sit it in the room with the guitar and see what your RH is. Below 35% is the danger territory.
There are in-case humidifiers. Even if one is advertised as being meant to go in the soundhole, don't ever do that. If they leak or drip they'll do more harm than they were preventing in the first place. Stick it in the accessory compartment of a hardshell case and they'll humidify the guitar that's kept in there.
But, far more effective and beneficial for your health and that of your guitars is a room humidifier. There are three types - warm mist, cool mist, and ultrasonic. Don't ever buy warm mist or ultrasonic. Warm mist is just boiling water and letting the steam rise into the room. It will condense on nearby surfaces, especially cool metal ones, and can cause damage to electronics, guitar hardware, and your home itself if it's condensing on a nearby wall. Ultrasonic is terrible unless you're shelling out for distilled water or a reverse-osmosis system to feed it, as it generates tiny water particles that keep their dissolved mineral content, so when they land on surfaces they evaporate and leave tiny bits of mineral dust on everything that builds up over time and makes things like the crevices of guitar hardware or nearby electronics filthy.
Cool mist is where it's at, as it uses a replaceable filter to wick water upwards and then just blows a fan through the moist filter to evaporate some of it and distribute it into the room. That means that you can use tapwater, and the minerals will crystalize on the washable/replaceable filter instead of on the items in the room. And, since there's no supersaturated air or steam involved, it doesn't condense on surfaces, unless you've got a poorly insulated window and a crazy high indoor RH (in which case the windows will sweat).
With reasonable-quality windows in Ottawa weather, I find the 37-42% RH range to be ideal. 40-50% is what people will tell you from a pure guitar perspective, but 50% will encourage window sweating during those -20C nights unless you have high-end modern windows. 37-42% keeps the guitars happy and doesn't encourage the problems that come with moist windows.
Your sinuses, throat, and skin will also be infinitely more happy at that RH range than at the 10% RH you can often encounter at this time of year in Canada. Any wood floors or furniture will also be happier (you get warped hardwood floors from the extreme contraction-expansion cycles of seasonal changes with unregulated RH). Wooden guitar necks need regular adjustment and develop fret sprout from similar cycles.
But spend the $40 on a hygrometer first, take the day to calibrate it properly, and find out what's going on first. Like I said, you might be in a tight home or one with a central humidifier you didn't realize existed, and you might be sitting at an ideal RH already.
Edit: Larry apparently just said all this, much less verbosely as I was typing my diatribe against dry Canadian winter air
