How long for floor boards to acclimatize -- experiments
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- čas přidán 20. 08. 2024
- I wanted to know how long it took for hardwood floor boards to acclimatize to changes in humidity before installation. So I set up an experiment and gathered lots of data. The answer, unfortunately, is far from clear.
Thank you for providing the quickest answer ever to a youtube question
Wadsworth constant: one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any CZcams video without missing any important content.
Matthias: challenge accepted.
Let's assume he did this on purpose to see if there's a noticeable drop in the retention graph. Steve Ramsey has also done this
Woodworking actually helps me as a civil engineering student. Been a viewer since 8th grade, now I can actually apply your content to my studies. Thank you!
"a man of focus, commitment, sheer will".....thanks for the effort Matthias
I usually let it acclimatize for weeks, not on purpose but because it always takes me weeks to finally get to putting it in 😂👍🏻
This is why for 'floating flooring' you need to leave small gap (1cm or 1/2inch) between material end and wall on every side and then just cover that gap with decorative board / door step panel. Very nice test!
Oddly enough when this was posted I had just been talking to my wife about when we move how we have to replace all carpet with wood flooring. We won't be moving for a while, and thanks to this helpful video we wouldn't have flooring in our new house for some time... But, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for better flooring.
We purchased wide plank hardwood flooring from Hull Forest Products in Connecticut. They suggested letting it sit for four weeks in your home, not in a box but stickered in a stack. gluing down with polyurethane glue helps too. five years later, no complaints.
Gluing it down won't stop them from cupping though. As Mattias showed, the cupping comes from the top being pressed together. Which will happen when there isn't enough room for the boards to expand.
You wouldn't think this kind of thing would make for an interesting video, and to be fair it probably does take a certain kind of person to enjoy it, but I have to say I found it really interesting to watch.
The lesson learned is when building anything from wood whether it be with somewhat dry, dry, or very dry wood is to build it in a manner that accommodates these changes. In furniture, this is done with floating panels, providing room for expansion, paying attention to the direction of grain and largest axis of expansion, etc. For flooring, this is in part accomplished by leaving room for expansion along walls.
I had the opportunity to meet the guy that designed some of the earliest computer controlled wood drying kilns for use at sawmills in western Canada, using Data General MicroNOVA minicomputers to control all aspects of the kilns. His kilns used significantly less energy than others because he understood something that you've observed here: temperature has a greater effect on wood drying than relative humidity. The competition were blowing hot air at the lumber, then they would adjust the vents on the kiln to hold a certain level of RH. This means that for the majority of the time the kiln ran, they would be pumping hot humid air out of the vents into the atmosphere, and paying dearly to heat cold dry air to replace it. How his kiln worked was he would keep the vents closed, and just keep the air circulating at a fixed temperature. What's important to realize is that as the RH of the air increases, the thermal capacity of the air also increases, so while the air is more humid, it also carries much more heat, and it is the heat that has the biggest effect on drying wood.
There's an old wood kiln tucked away under the Tim Hortons at BCIT that was used to study steam drying. My instructor was proud to have been involved in the work and said it produced lumber with less warping as well.
Hard to wrap your head around huh?
“Hey guys, let’s dry that timber with wet air albeit hot”.
Counter intuitive, but many things are like that.
chunderstorm I wonder if my guy was involved with BCIT. He was based in BC, and he did mention to me that reduced loss due to warpage was another major benefit of his setup. He said that increased production due to decreased warpage was often high enough to pay for one of his kilns in 3 months. Mills were wrecking _a lot_ of lumber in their kilns, but because they didn’t have anything better to compare too they saw it as acceptable loss.
the dry kiln guys use a probe to keep an eye on actual moisture content, pretty sure it's just a calibrated ohmmeter. Not that you're gonna repeat this, but just info. Flooring installers usually say 3 days to acclimate...haha! I always tried to get a few weeks for my hardwood installs, but its good to see some data on the matter. next up: deck boards, cup up or cup down
it depends. when they move from an air conditioned store to an air conditioned house, what difference would it make?
@@natalieisagirlnow Lots, some houses are much more humid than others (especially if on old slab on grade with high water table w/o poly under the concrete + french drains/sump pump...etc..) You need ac-climate the wood to YOUR house.
They go from a distributors warehouse to the store. Then to the customers house. Many stores do not do much heat or AC in their warehouse or back room storage area. The distribution warehouse is not AC and will be heated just enough to keep stuff from freezing. Longer is better for acclimating!
@@stephenmiller6690 except it may sit in the big box store for months
@@natalieisagirlnow And? People's homes vary wildly in temperature stability and humidity.
Are the installers plugging in a box to log the temperature and humidity for a year before coming by to judge whether or not sitting in a box for 4 days will be fine because the environment is close enough to what the wood is being stored at? No, of course not.
That mean's the only safe way to do it is to leave it longer. And not in the box.
OR they could just install it in a way that let's it expand more...but that causes WAY more issues for the home owner. But HEY! It saves the installers a few days of waiting, so its just FINE right?
I was always going to watch the whole video anyway but putting the meat of your answer in the first 10 seconds is downright classy.
Mattias: "This is going to be a long video"
Me: *pauses video and gets popcorn and a beverage*
When I hear "...long video" I usually think 90+ minutes. I was VERY surprised when the video ended after 9...
Love these kinds of videos. That there isn’t a simple formula or neat conclusion is itself something learned.
You can remove hot-glue by applying a small amount of denatured alcohol (or isopropyl alcohol) to it. The alcohol will cause it to completely release its grip on whatever it is stuck to, allowing it to be peeled off leaving no residue behind.
never knew this, thanks
will have to try that out!
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 methanol works best.
@@Francois_Dupont methanol vapours are quite dangerous. Isopropyl alcohol dissolves hot glue nicely enough, I'd say
Luis Miguel Martinez in my experience, it’s not dissolving the HG, it’s wicking between the HG and the other surface releasing the mechanical bond.
Would the test jig being made from wood have any impact?
Yes. Forgot to mention that. Lengthwise expansion is about a tenth of what it is across the grain, so it doesn't throw things out by that much.
🐂 💩
@@SSMJWolf very high iq reply
@@erkivinni8707 👍🏻
Great question... and equally great answer from Matthias :)
Thank you so much for publishing this data! REALLY interesting. Especially the drying through the ends which makes a lot of sense, if you put a piece of timber in a cup of water it wicks it up where as if you splash water on the side it doesn't do much. I find that intuitive even if unexpected. Also really interesting is that if you drive the moisture out aggressively it *never* comes back in. Something to do with cellular vapour pressure in there, I suspect. I guess this is why we buy kiln dried timber for stability reasons. Again, thank you! I really appreciated this one :-)
I love the comment at the end. I wish more people had some concept of how difficult it can be to make more than observations. Science is complicated.
Most woods dry more from the end grain than the cross grain. That's why you seal the ends when drying green wood so it doesn't split and check. There is very little shrinkage lengthwise compared to crosswise. Oak is open grain hardwood, basically a bunch of straws with large pores. You might try to seal the end grain so all the drying is from the sides, but it might not make that much difference since you are measuring in the middle. It's an interesting experiment.
I imagine that most experienced installers have a intuitive feel for how long to let a product adapt, but most installers today are just wanting to get the job done. Our humidity in the southern US is so different from season to season so it would be hard to determine when the wood is "stable" and it would also depend a lot on the species. We have both Red Oak and Southern Yellow Pine flooring in our house and the Oak moves a lot more than the SYP.
If you weren't 1k miles away, I'd give you some SYP to test. :)
For this topic it is worth noting that the dimensional shrinkage will be less noticeable in quartersawn flooring, as the dimensional change coefficient for tangential direction (side to side in the flatsawn flooring) is more than 2x that of the radial direction (side to side in quartersawn). You might, if you have a quartersawn floor, notice that you are a few microns taller during the humid times…
This is awesome. I am so glad that I have found your channel. You are interested in all the same questions that I am.
Matthias, Protip: isopropyl alcohol makes hot glue release from everything i've ever tried it on.
Yeah, finding this out a while back was a life changer for me. It makes Hot glue sooo much easier to work with.
I gotta try that
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 acetone works too
@@tissuepaper9962 but acetone is nastier and it melts most finish and plastics. Alcohol is a milder solvant.
@@stratocactus Careful, alcohol unqualified is ethanol, whereas isopropyl alcohol is isopropanol, not ethanol.
“Imagine how much more complicated it would be trying to characterize a living thing” i think there is a deeper meaning that he is hiding behind this.
"Watching paint dry" taken to the next level.
I left the flooring in my house for six weeks. It wasn't because I was trying to acclimatize them but because I was so damn lazy to start on the project.
It wasn't too long, and not too many experiments. Love it all.
This is why I love science rather than "experience" and folk lore.
Very interesting Matthias! End result is right on: "Useful data but no clear model"! 👍👍👏👏😉😉
Thanks for doing this! That's clearly a great deal of work. I would offer this as an explanation that may help understand at least some of what's going on. The problem you addressed assumes moisture content as a whole. However there are actually 2 types of moisture content present in wood... the moisture BETWEEN the cells, and the moisture WITHIN the cells. The moisture between the wood cells changes with the environment. However wood cell moisture only decreases over time. As the cells "die" (I know they're already dead, but they still have water content) they give off moisture which will never again re-enter the cells. Once the wood is fully dry, that portion of the dimensional change will cease. Only the moisture content between the cells will change after that so the dimension change will be less from that point on.
Also... because of the structure of the wood... (as I know you know already) the moisture from both sources will escape more easily from the ends of the wood than from the sides of it... thus the ends of your flooring being gapped, while the middle of them were still tight.
Great video, thanks!
Given the structure of wood, basically long tubes, it makes sense that the moisture leaves by the end grain and that's where it narrows the most. So perhaps sealing the ends with a dab of varnish when installing might mitigate that effect.
Cool experiments and graphs.
Fascinating graphs. It's a deep rabbit hole indeed.
A remarkable, and worthwhile, exercise. A few notes- using prefinished flooring may have skewed the data, though I can't really guess in what direction! Secondly, the idea behind acclimatization is not to reach a point of either minimum or maximum expansion, but to reach a point where the rate of change is the same as the surrounding structure- and that may be impossible, because the exposed surface will be reacting differently to heat and humidity than the underside. Preventing significant cup will always be down to the fasteners, in the short term.
I'm generally inclined to use a vapor barrier under hardwood, something with limited porosity, like Tyvek, so that the principal component of acclimatization is the room above, and not the subfloor and rooms below. Perhaps that's just overcautious, or perhaps there's no point, but I'm a bit of an old crank, and tend to stay with what works, for me.
Either way, it's clear that the mechanism of acclimatization is considerably more complex than I had assumed. I'll probably stay with 14 days (except in extreme conditions), as much for logistic reasons as anything else. Thanks for your research!
corss grain vsl long grain is different by 10x. The joists will never grow and shrink in length at the same rate as the wood widens and narrows.
Very interesting! Fingers crossed the solid vinyl planks I installed only vary with temperature!
(They had no obvious wood fiber content, although there are lots of "vinyl" products that look like MDF when you cut them!)
Great analysis. Would be interesting to take the learning and make a predictive test machine that would tell you when wood is at steady state and ready to use.
Fwiw, if you have hot glue attached to wiring and want it removed, just saturate it with rubbing alcohol/isopropyl alcohol, via a paper towel or somesuch, and the hot glue can very easily be popped off of the surface. (this works for hot glue on many surfaces; pcbs, wiring, etc)
Wow. Answer at the start of the video, nice
might kill audience retention though! :)
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 I still watched it. I think that if someone is here just for the raw info he will have no retention and skip ahead anyways ;)
Matthias random stuff doubt your audience on this channel has that short of an attention span. Your main channel I would agree. Theyre entertained with different content.
Just installed laminate for a friend, told em too store the laminate inside the week prior. Showed up and they had kept it in garage. His wife said to do it anyways, stating she didnt believe me.. day after install.... yeah you get the point, and who would have guessed. Its my fault... can i get a RIP to my friend, no more beers at his house..
this was extremely interesting and fun, but I am sure some material scientists went over this already and there are models for drying wood published in the scientific literature
And now we know more about hard wood floors then we ever wanted to know
I like using dew point instead of relative humidity. It gives you a better sense of the actual moisture, and you can graph it on the same scale with the temperature.
I do use dew point as well for a lot of stuff, but for this, relative humidity is a better indicator. Realistically, you need a measure where relative humidity goes UP with temperature not down. For the same dewpoint, relative humidity goes down a lot as temperature goes up.
This was so cool! Thanks for sharing, Matthias.
If you ever wanted to experiment again you could try many of the floating floorboards available. Many of these made with real wood havsvery significant movement. I've seen some bad results but heard a story where the floor expanded so much that is pushed the walls outward by some 50mm in one house in Australia. Yet they're sold as being stable.
Your gig appears to be about 2 feet long and you are measuring the effect of change in moisture content about a foot away from where the majority of moisture ingress occurs. This would somewhat explain the bounce in data. As you know Mattias, oak is ring porous and shrinkaqe/expansion in the middle of your gig is due dimensional changes due to moisture content changes from wicking (from the ends of the gig). There are several other effects: quarter sawn versus radial sawn versus tangential (tangential shrinkage being the greatest at about 10%), surface finish of your planks, springwood versus latewood etcetera, but the bottom line is that rates of change of width of oak is much slower than the environmental change of relative humidity which is of course dependant on temperature. Wood is not a good insulator but it does have an R value, which means your trapped humidity sensor is a good indicator of the humidity but not a great indicator of moisture content in the ring porous oak. Your experiment is awesome and you say "it's complicated", and it is, but when you think of how much lag there is between the environmental rate of change of humidity versus the rate of change of moisture content, there shouldn't be any surprise that it takes longer three or four days for the oak to reach equilibrium. Your conclusion should be that it takes weeks rather than days, but the oak should also be stickered before installing. It is no wonder why engineered hardwood floor has become so popular because the oak/maple/ash veneer on the surface is somewhat protected from environmentally induced dimensional changes because of the plywood base. Like you, I prefer the hardwood strip flooring and know what to do to acclimatize it --> weeks, not days.
This is VERY interesting in regard to piano tuning. The sound table absorb humidity and bows more or less with humidity. The question is how long it takes to change its bowing?
Super interesting! I wonder if perhaps the capillaries shrinking as the wood dries at 50 degrees make it less susceptible to absorbing moisture again once it's out of your freezer / heater box. That would explain why it settles at a lower thickness than before.
The wood the indicator is attached to also changes with humidity, no wonder the results are not easy to interpret.
Two immediate comments:
1. Never in the modern history of engineering has any speaker identified which plot is which in an Excel-generated graph - or labelled the axes or changed from the default axis scales. You are hereby expelled from the profession.
2. Never in the history of home construction has a flooring contractor ever left the wood out to equilibrate properly. In my house, fearing that they may have done this, the workers allowed a puddle of water to fall on the floor after installing it. That did the trick - but the boards went convex, not concave.
if it’s water in the surface, that would go convex. if it gains humidity slowly, it would be more like what I described.
I worked with a flooring contractor in the bay area a decade ago who would unbox and loose stack the flooring for several weeks before installing. He also conducted many tests with moisture meters. There's a few out there who know how to properly do the work, but they are rare.
I really liked the experiment and it looks to be calculated thoroughly. One question: if you are trying to measure crimp and expansion of the wood, wouldn't it be better to have your measuring device made of some other material? I really do not know if wood of the measuring device will crimp/expand length-wise.
You really do amazing and interesting content! ...and no World Of Tanks (or similar bs) in sight! Thank you!
Instead of endlesly fighting to keep floor panels not looking wornout and dirty, i bought large amount of sticky plastic with similar wood pattern printed on. Now when something bad happens I just glue new sheet on. It always looks better than real wooden floor. It is watertight too.
you must be joking!
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 I must agree... fake looks better than real!?
The one other way I would have loved to see the data graphed is based on absolute humidity (lb water/lb air or for metric kg water/kg air). Relative humidity is just that RELATIVE. I think you may have noticed something else based on absolute humidity.
yes, but absolute humidity is an even worse metric with regards to absorption. You need a metric where humidity goes up with temperature even faster than relative humidity to reflect how the wood sees it.
Hm, seems like hardwood floors would not be suitable due to seasonal variations here in Sweden. AC is uncommon here (it generally isn't needed) but humidity varies from less than 10 % in the winter indoors, to 60 % in the summer. Even if you let it acclimatize, it would be completely off after half a year, either creating bowing or gaps.
Seems like there is some insulating property that reduces the shrinkage in the middle.
I'd guess the top and bottom board began shrinking before the middle board for that same reason. The top and bottom have more surface area exposed. Once they shrunk they exposed more of the inner two allowing them to shrink also.
there is a much bigger surface area than the edges on the back. Th back has no varnish on it.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Yes, that is what I thought Matthias. When it was clamped up first the front of the panel has a sheet of some kind of plastic, varnish or lacquer on the front, so any atmospheric effects are coming from the back and edges. When we had solid wood flooring installed in our house about 15 years ago in Ireland I don't think that the solid wood pieces were given any time to acclimatise, but the folks laying it used a 3mm thick washer as a spacer between every 5th joint and after a few weeks it fit perfectly and still does, this was laid on a concrete screed with a thick flexible adhesive underneath. I guess it depends on the coverage of the adhesive, but once it is on the back and the lacquer is on the top the floor is pretty well sealed so I can't see any changes happening quickly if the top is butted together tightly.
temperature has a relationship with the maximum amount of moisture air can hold without condensing. higher temp=more capacity. relative humidity is the ration of actual moisture and max capacity (relates to temperature, vapor pressure of water). relative humidity and temperature are for the most part independent of each other. i think
dont know if that sensor you have is measuring absolute humidity or relative...
Wood dries out through the end grain faster. When trees are cut down for milling they coat the ends, if not coated the ends crack from shrinking.
When you dry timber in a kiln air movement matters a lot. That might be the explanation for the non matching slopes.
We thought you promised your wife not to touch the refrigerator anymore ,loved the video!
Do you think the wooden framework supporting the dial indicator could have also been affected by the humidity and temperature changes?
Yes. Forgot to mention that. Lengthwise expansion is about a tenth of what it is across the grain, so it doesn't throw things out by that much.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 The information is still quite useful. The changes in the frame make the data relative, as opposed to absolute. But then again, they were already going to be relative.
This is a first think I had when I saw the video. @@matthiasrandomstuff2221 maybe it will be better to have steel frame to measure without fluency of humanity on the frame itself. And with steel you can even take care of temperature coefficient so it will be very precise.
@@ssaasszza Coefficient of thermal expansion of steel is a lot higher than wood.
@@jeffreythompson9549 yes, but it is linear and not effected by humanidity...
How about nailing the wood floor to a piece of 3/4” plywood and then test it. It would be closer to the actual installation in your home. That was an interesting video, thanks!
that would add more confounding factors. I wanted to test the boards.
Useful data but no clear model.
Thanks for the great content.
Keep up the good work.
בס״ד
Amazing video 👍
even in material science that is a biiiiiig challenge when you need to condition the material to a specific climate. its not straight forward and not really solved what the best practice is. it can take month till a specimen of plastic or fiber reinforced plastic reaches real equilibrium. and im talking about mm thick specimen. found it funny seeing your video and that you came to the "right" conclusion "its complicated" :D ... those thick board will probably take weeks or month. but there will be probably a point where the change is small enough and that it wont be critical for laying them down.
Looks like the U.S. Covid19 graph. This is great info to installers, who can only gain this much knowledge over years of trial and error, and seems to apply to everyone from the "president" on down
Not really. They can't leave the stuff unpackaged for that long.
I’m a flooring installer and we allow 3 days. The manufacturer requires that and we allow them to claim the lawsuit if it doesn’t accumulate in that time.
And the bottom is smaller then the top to allow for it to be nailed and not change the top “finished” side size
Ah, good point, the nail expands the wood a tiny bit where it goes through. I do wonder what humidity the wood has coming from the factory.
Now I don't feel so bad for taking 2 months to lay the laminate. Although, When I started laying them, they where bending in the same direction as your test pieces did. And the few I had to rip down, 600mm into the cut, the kerf closed up where I started the cut. It's all well and good acclimatizing them to your houses climate. But if they are manufactured in a hot swamp, they will only be straight in the equvilent hot swamp conditions. And laminate being HDF, just good MDF, it's wierd that it's that dimension that they would bend.
Very interesting and cool! I like it.
Matthias, your stander is wood also so did you measure ONLY the Floor planks size or both of them ? I think you should make a stand from Metal or better Stone or glass ;-)
So basically, 4 days is too short and 2 weeks with the packages opened would be a safe bet? Thanks Matthias!
Could the measuring devices somehow be influenced by the extreme temperature differences of some 70deg?
Fantastic
Really appreciate the work you put into these experiments or were you just putting off installing the boards.?
I'm curious how a solid board of the same width would have behaved by comparison to take out whatever is going on with the joints between the boards.
I'm curious too, but I don't feel like re running this experiment.
just get 2 .004 shims to space each board and put er down. the weather is always changing.
Obviously, the 4 days that your floor installer let the wood acclimize to your house was not long enough. However, the three weeks you measured for the humidity and gap spacing to equalize in your house was complete worst case scenario. Most hardwood flooring is stored in climate controlled warehouses and basically never set outside, unboxed in 80° humidity for almost a week prior to being immediately installed in your house. So if I ever get hardwood flooring I'm setting it in my house for longer than 4 days but not more than 3 weeks. Haha
floor too moist is not the problem. Flooor too dry fromthe factory IS.
In the Pacific NW the distribution warehouses are not climate controlled. No AC and just enough heat in the winter to keep stuff from freezing. Your area may be different.
Now that was some cool, hot and dry stuff... 🤣😂😉👍🏻
Hi Matthias! Is there any chance that the dial indicator is "too precise" for this job and that the settling values you had on the graph are somewhat skewed by this preciseness ? Some folks also mentioned the fact the jig is wooden, which may throw the results one way or another if lenghtwise, the wood doesnt have the same behaviour in time?
Maybe it would have been a good idea to re-position the graph at some points in time? For example at the beginning, the middle and end of an experiment "section". May I suggest using calipers? Although, chances are it's an order of magnitude less accurate than the dial indicator? Just inputting my thoughts on the experiment, but otherwise great show of wood movement! It's actually quite impressive to see how T and H influence wood that much! Thank you for the content :)
yes I was measuring to the hundredths of a millimeter for four boards. that would be half a wavelength of light per board. but I was seeing total swings of more than a millimeter, which would make for some noticeable gaps or cupping.
Great job, however if temperatures goes up humidity goes up as well logically..... not the opposite.
if temperature goes up, at the same absolute humidity, relative humidity goes down.
1:29 Hey, That is BME 280. Good cheap sensors
that's right. But probably not a real BME280 but a chines knockoff, seeing that it was cheap and from china.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Yeah, probably. But it works tho.
Also a real magic not finding electronics that aren't made in china
I have knock-off BME280 and genuine SHT21 and DS1624 sensors. I'm plot graph on grafana about a two year and must say: knock-off is pretty good. It's draw a shape about 1:1 to SHT21 with -3% rH offset.
@@Flextro Knock off can be pretty good probably because they just use the same/fairly similar quality components. What makes them knock off is they steal the design. Not going through a lengthy process of designing and RnD probably drives down the cost since you can just have lowly paying workers just do the manufacturing.
Also, I heard that there's this thing called third shift where the factory that's making the original, churning more product late at night to be sold cheaper without the authorization of the brand.
Could the mystery constant offsets be an effect of hot-glue getting (almost) liquid and starts to creep? Little bit like aluminium under high load...
good stuff
Pretty interesting!!! 😊
Does the performance of the indicator change with temperature? And is that change negligible? Thanks for a great video.
Well even tho the results varied a lot we know for sure now to wait longer unless we want wonky floors. TY
what I'm really wondering is why are petroleum jelly containers the exact same design world wide !
That's an interesting question!
Globalism for you!
Because it's cheaper that way
(MW style response, I would assume he had beat me to it)
Fascinating
Maybe the unknown variations are also because the end grain is where the majority of the moisture enters and leaves the wood.
Mathematically, how did you compensate the length curve for humidity and such?
I compensated for temperature. Just linear - subtract timeperatuer times a constant that I worked out.
Thanks!
*Open's video*
"answer at least a week, probably 4 weeks"
*Closes video*
Cool stuff, what do you think the effect of the wooden stand is? I would expect that it would move as much as the boards.
I've installed several hardwood floors and I don't let the wood acclimatize at all. Just bang it down. Home Depot and Lowes has a very similar climate to a house. Not only that but the climate in my house changes with the seasons. Never had a problem. It's an old wives tale.
Are you in the semi Aired West like me
@@vbart1776 Ontario, Canada
If you buy a whole load, chances are, its straight from the factory.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Possible. Another complicating factor is your experiment has the boards out in the open. I've always seen hardwood "acclimatizing" in the boxes, with the boxes stacked. It would take a year.
Fasenating 👍🏻
Title question answered within 12 seconds? That's gotta be in the running for a youtube record.
I am not sure if it is useful but you might try and plot size vs absolute humidity instead of relative humidity.
that would be even more useless than relative humidity. relative humidity isn’t great but absolute is worse.
Next time, use hot glue and to get it off, just spray it with isopropyl alcohol. Clean as new!
Years ago a coffee manufacturer was pushing it's freeze dried coffee grounds in it's commercials. I think it was coffee.
In any case, did you consider the drying that takes place when you drop the wood's temperature below zero? That may account for some of the weird readings after it's -20 degree chill pill.
it dries much more slowly at low temperatures.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221
Interesting.
So what would be the value in freeze drying if freezing does in fact dry something?
Maybe it only benefits small items like coffee beans?
Rh readings depend enormously upon temperature. The sensors are not accurate when they are not themselves acclimatised or properly compensated.
yes, those sensors have errors as well, and hysteresis, though I expect them to be within 10 percent or closer.
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 The trouble is, within 10 percent of what? I used to work on a widget that measured humidity using a clever little chip, and it mostly broadly agreed with our handheld fluke thing, (when the chips weren't poisoned in the soldering process) but we were frequently tearing our hair out asking the question: "what really is RH anyway?" because it was so hard to measure reliably.
@@Rich-on6fe Was it Matthias or Big Clive that showed how to calibrate RH sensors? The atmosphere above various wet salts is a known humidity.
@@austenite239 I didn't see that one. We went as far as using a commercial chamber, experimenting with cigar-humidifying things (!) and eventually the boss-man made an optical thing with a mirror and a peltier cooler to establish the dew-point. Trying to get a solid handle on the rh showed it to be a really slippery thing where you clearly spent most of the time observing the peculiarities of your measurement device rather than just the humidity itself. Trouble is, humans just have only the vaguest 'feel' for what the hell humidity really is. We can't see it, smell it, taste it, rarely have to think about it. In quantity terms it could be anything and you need to lean on science fundamentals to try and grasp it. And Rh shifts with temperature.
Shouldn't you do just 1 board as a baseline?
How does the Dial Gauge respond to 50 Deg C temps over time?
what about PVC floors
How did you read the dial indicator? Did you look at all the pictures and read it manually or did you write some fancy program to do it for you?😀
manually
@@matthiasrandomstuff2221 Wow that must have been a lot of work. A picture every hour over the course of a month must be a lot of pictures.