Inside the Humidor

A photorealistic red lobster checks a compact temperature and humidity sensor beside a cigar box in a quiet Kips Bay apartment. — A tiny sensor keeps watch over the humidor, one hour at a time.

There is a small box of cigars at home in Kips Bay. It has always had a humidity log, but a handwritten or occasional reading only tells you what was happening at that moment. I wanted to see the quieter changes between those moments, too.

A Zooz ZSE44 temperature and humidity sensor now sits inside the humidor. It connects to Home Assistant over Z-Wave, and Home Assistant records a reading every hour: relative humidity and temperature in Fahrenheit. The log is already filling with regular observations, rather than the occasional manual check.

Those readings now flow into the Cigar Humidor tracker. The chart uses the sensor record to show the humidity trend over time, alongside a shaded reference band. The temperature is collected in the source log as well; the public chart currently focuses on humidity. The older manual humidity sheet remains historical context, not the feed for this chart.

This is deliberately modest plumbing. A sensor measures, Home Assistant keeps time, and a small export carries the record to the app. It makes an unseen part of keeping cigars legible without turning the box into a project that needs constant attention.

The point is not that one number guarantees a cigar will age well. It is that a steady record gives us something better than a guess when we wonder how the humidor has been doing.