D'Addario Humidification system

[Niteshooter]

Thought I'd follow up on this since I like to be frugal (aka cheap) when it comes to stuff. This system humidifies and also absorbs moisture depending on relative humidity in your case. I thought this was kind of handy because I've had one guitar that was over humidified and this damaged the braces and caused the back to form humps. Up till then I had only be using the Oasis system and it has worked will with our other Larrivee's.

But I like the idea of the D'Addario. But not that once they dried out they needed to be replaced. What I always pondered was if it also absorbed excess moisture did that mean that it could be regenerated? Well turns out the answer is yes, I've been experimenting all summer with a dried out pack and sure enough after leaving it sitting open in the house which gets very humid during the summer it has returned to it's normal state.

How I stumbled upon this, in the winter our house is really dry and I usually refilled the Oasis once a week with at minimum one syringe full of distilled water. But after the over humidified guitar I though what about using the D'Addario, so I picked up a pack. Problem was it was pretty much drying out after a month, so being 'frugal' I decided to put in an oasis and then take the double D'Addario pack and drape it over the Oasis in the sound hole on a guitar. Sure enough the Oasis would run out of water, but keep the D'Addario in pretty much new condition all winter. If I missed a week the D'Addario would pick up the slack and after a few weeks would regenerate with the Oasis. Up to this year once things got humid I would just pack away the D'Addarios which were fully recharged in their foil bags and reuse them again the following winter. I'm now on my third cycle.

So this winter the wife completely dried out the D'Addario pack in her L-03r (you can tell because you can feel the pebbles or whatever D'Addario uses in these things) but instead of tossing it I left it out in the basement to see what would happen. Took about 2 months but it's now back to normal. I have no idea how many of these cycles these things are capable of going through but I suppose I'll eventually figure this out.

Of note, I only use the double packs in our L's and D's without the single headstock packs. I use those in our Parlours with an Oasis and it seems so far to work ok over the past three winters. Also each week I carefully inspect for any signs of over or under humidification especially now that I've had these packs go through several cycles. I also keep 3 humidity meters with the cases, one I picked up that is used for gun lockers and two that are your basic household temp/humidity gauges.

[Yippie]

I have also been re-humidifing my humipacks and have had no issues. I also use a sponge in a drilled out soap dish at the headstock to help humidity the case which has worked very well for me with the humipacks.

[petluo]

I've never needed to dehumidify a guitar, but when it gets dry here I find if you soak a sponge in water, squeeze it, shake it until no more water comes out, put the now damp sponge in a ziploc baggie, poke some holes in the baggie and hang the baggie from the strings into the soundhole with a paperclip, that humidifies a guitar nicely, as confirmed by the hygrometer in my acoustic's case.

Jeffrey Nadrich