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Is there a "got to have" standard? Looking for brand names and ballpark prices and where to find.

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DES - Shepherd, MI

Lowes sells digital hygrometers very reasonably. So does Radio Shack. But I don't trust their products....

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

I ordered mine from stew mac. It seems to be pretty good.

I buy most of mine(4) from Stewmac - digital. I think they are around $24. each...something like that. I also have two more expensive ones ( around $60 each) and they work the same as the cheaper ones StewMac sells. I have about six of the realy cheap units that Musicians Friend sells for guitar cases..something like $10 each...they work fairly accurately...within 1-2 degrees of the others. I have them everwhere... I even have the needle type ( sailor weather thig-a-ma-jig) outside because most of my heavy machinery is on my back deck...that's where my cutting and sanding gets done...but here in Florida any thing less than 100% is a good day!

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Dave Bland

remember...

"If it doesn't play in tune...it's just pretty wood"

If you want a really accurate reading of the humidity in your shop or to calibrate your wall hygrometer, get a sling hygrometer. Sling Hygrometer There are several available but they are typically more expensive than the wall digi's. But they are the standard used by professionals in weather related fields.

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Tickle your guitar daily, and it'll tickle you back.

I've got several and can safely say that none of those hygrometers are worth a darn. I know that's strong language but now having owned an Abbeon C200 Digital Hygrometer/thermometer accurate to +/-2% (as accurate as you can get) I can safely say that those other units aren't that accurate. I've tried them, put them up against the Abbeon and without fail they're off by anywhere from 8% or more, often more especially at the extremes when the Abbeon reads that it's 26% and the digital reads that it's 35%.

It's expensive at $208 plus $35 for the case, but worth EVERY PENNY. These are more accurate than a sling psychrometer because consistency in sling period and rpms will change the reading as will if the thermometers aren't calibrated, etc.

Something to consider....

Where do you get them?

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DES - Shepherd, MI

Interesting web site. Do you have and use the calibration solutions and all that they offer? How does that stuff work?

I'm not concerned with the extremes, so how do the others compare to C200 at the 45-50% area?

BTW, +/- 2% means that if you had two C200's in your hands, one could read 40% and the other read 44%, and they would still be considered correct. Just something to think about when comparing hygrometers to one another.

I agree about the slings; most innacurate method going, as the operator has more influence on it than the RH does <g> I do use mine to double check every now and then, but what a pain.

I have multiple hygrometers all over the place, and that, to me, is more important than one killer unit. Even the best unit in the world can. and will, lose its calibration, and the only way to know if it just did or not, at a glance, is to compare it to another. In my shop, I can see at least 2 of them at any glance, and if they're within 2% of each other(usually 1% or less, as I carefully calibrate them twice yearly), all is fine. But every now and then, a battery goes weak, or dust gets into one(the mechanical ones), and they are off.

It's the most important tool in your shop.

I do not have the calibration blocks. My madness is that I use the C200 to weekly get a take on the general RH trend juxaposed against my other Luft analog hygrometer that I bought years ago from LMI. Given that I don't use it a lot, I'm inclined to send it in for periodic calibration rather than doing the calibration myself. It seems to me that in order to calibrate things properly you need to maintain the environment to higher tolerances than I can in my shop. A lab can control conditions much better and so I'm inclined to let someone else do the work.