BODEGA 15 Cooler Humidor Review

Today we are going to review BODEGA 15 Cooler Humidor, one of the most popular brands which are producing wine coolers. Well, let’s see can we you use it for aging our stogies.

Specification

• Cigar held: 400+
• Heating and cooling functions
• Temperature range 16℃-22℃ (62°F to 72°F)
• Humidity setting range: 50%-80%
• Air Circulation: semiconductor refrigeration technology
• Digital thermostat: included
• Built-in or freestanding cabinet
• 3 adjustable wooden shelves and 1 adjustable wooden drawers
• Dimensions(HxWxD) 34.25’’ x 14.9’’ x 23’’

Maybe not even, but you also have a desire to get good buys when boxes come out on sale, or you have a particular brand that you like, you are somebody that needs a cigar humidor. I’ve talked to several experts in the industry and after telling them how I consume and what I like to do for saving money on perspective.

Size

This one might be a little bit big for some of you. It says it has a 400-count availability to it. I got it more for box storage when I get them, but also have, several singles and ones that I would just like to put in the humidor anyway, outside of the box, just to see what it looks like.

Seasoning

So that’s how I’m going to be using it. I have spent the last three full days seasoning this. You do have to take out the weather seal on the inside, which I’ll show you here in a second, to access the screws to tighten down the handle.

Also, the directions that come with this are not great. There were no seasoning directions. So I took my cue from Tim Swanson over at cigar daily. When he was doing a review on his new air that he had just. for two days at five degrees above the temperature, you would like to hold it. So right now I’ve been seasoning this particular one at 73% humidity and 68 degrees, internal temperature or inside the temperature of the humidor.

I say internal temperature because I’m a barbecue guy. I’m going to be keeping the humidor at 68. Soon as I load these in, you will notice also this is a built-in and, an all in one solution. So as I had mentioned, it does do, hot and cold temperature-wise, also humidity.

And I’ll show you the humidity chest underneath or the drawer. And you can see here at the bottom, that this is where all the exhaust and intake would come. As the unit runs to. Proper temperature and humidity and things like that. So if you wanna build it into something that you have already existed, you don’t need to keep space around it.

Trays and drawers

Everything happens in the front. One of the knocks that I have heard about this particular unit is you have to open it to access the trays here. It does come with, three trays, 1, 2, 3, and then this bottom one is where the humidification happens. So. If it’s just open like this, the tray is not going to come out.

By the way, this is the weather stripping here, or the seal that you need to pull back to access the handle there, just to close that up. So you do have to open the door up, and then these will slide out the little pegs that you ride up to resecure them. they all come out the same way.

And then, additionally, each drawer comes with a divider and you have, two different sections that you can put in. I took one out of the bottom one altogether because the bottom one I’m using for, box storage only. So I didn’t need the divider in there. And then as I’d mentioned here, You have the completely self-contained humidification.

self-contained humidification

So all you need to do is keep distilled water and it’s gotta be distilled water. Don’t be tricked by things that say words that look like distilled, which could be spring water or mineral water. Don’t use any of that because it’s going to, not evaporate properly. It’s gonna cause these to discolor. it’s.

Cause a quicker end of life for the whole humidifier itself. So distilled water is what you need to do. another one of. The complaint that I’ve heard about this is there’s no real way to tell how full it is. This is the port to put the water in. you can also disconnect the fan. You would take this one, this shelf out, you can disconnect the fan and then just lift the top off if you want.

But you can also just use this port with a funnel. It does not come with a funnel to fill it up. I found half a gallon. That is what fits here. There’s also, the door’s been open too long. you can see here, that there is a sight glass for how full the unit is on standby.

But I’ve also set a reminder for every two weeks for me to come in and just visually take a look. this is the fan. And then just put that in and you’re all set. There’s also a metal tray that separates, directly above the humidification drawer and that first storage drawer.

You have all of your access here. This locks automatically after, I don’t know, 15 or 20 seconds. So you just can’t go in and start making adjustments. You need to hold the lock button down and then hear it unlock. And now you can go ahead and make your temperature adjustments if you want. And you can make your humidification adjustments over here and you can to your light on or off if you want.

And, again, very easy. Go ahead and close that back up so you can see everything as it sits from the door. You cannot make adjustments. you do have to open up the door to make adjustments. No big deal. The light’s kind of a waste. It’s only sitting on the top. There isn’t any lighting on the side, which would be nice.

Lightning

Plus it’s some weird colored blue light, which I’m not a huge fan of, but that’s all right. handle’s nice and solid, and the unit is, solid. Nice heavy. If you go back to the previous video for the unboxing, you can see how it came shipping-wise. very nice, easy to just take apart, plug in and get going.

Capacity

So, now I will. Loaded up with cigars. And most importantly, put it in my higher to test the accuracy of the humidity. It has been sitting in a BTA calibration pack at 75% for the last day and a half. So it has been completely calibrated. So we’ll make sure that that is accurate. And then after we load it up with the cigars.

Wait a handful of hours before we come back and check the accuracy with an independent higher to see how accurate it is with the one that’s set on the BODEGA, 15-inch, 400-count cigar humidor. So standby for that. Okay. We have three drawers.

So this is like mostly the singles. And, four, five packs. And then I have my Oliva drawer, which is, only Oliva, mostly, sir, V Melans and different sizes. the bottom here. I don’t know if you can see it back there or not, but it’s box storage. So there are five boxes down here. there are 25 or technically 24 of these St. Francis. There was a box of 25 nubs and then there were boxes of 10 back there.

What the max amount would be at 400. I, I, what I’ll do is I’ll let this restabilize for the next handful of hours and then I’ll go grab my, hygrometer, stick it in there. And then if I need to I’ve, secured some styrofoam pieces to take some, space away as well within the unit to see if that helps stabilize temperatures.

Stick around and we’ll be back in a couple of hours after this stabilizes to put my higher in there. And we’ll compare it to the one that is built into the machine for three and a half hours into having the cigars back into the humidor. I have a 75% humidity calibration test with my higher. And if we take a look, we can see that it is 76, which means we’re one degree out of accuracy, which is fine.

No problem. It’s been that way for 12 hours or so. So we’re gonna stick this into the humidor and see where this higher measures with the one in the unit. So I have it. Top row. Once again, humidor box storage will leave the shelf, and, the generals singles and so forth randoms, and we are getting ready to do the higher test.

Humi and temperature ranges

So it should be 65. I have that set at 68. And, we’ll see where it goes from here. Close. And you’ll see, this is the fan letting you know the. Icon letting you know, that the humidity is running. This is the general circulation fan. And then when heating and cooling is running, there’d be another one-off to this side.

That looks the same. So, we’ll take a look and see where we’re at. I assume this is gonna take some time to adjust, get up the temperature and all that, should be pretty quick, but we’ll give it a couple of hours to settle in. Again, we’re looking for 68. You can see. The unit itself here is recovering, fairly quickly, already sitting where it needs to be 68.

And then we’ll just keep an eye on the hygrometer here, which again has been tested. And was it 76? It was one degree up. So we’re looking for anything 68 69, 67. I’d even be okay with 70, but I’d rather not. So, I’d be okay. At 69 or 67. Again, this is the BODEGA 15 inches.

Accurancy of thermoelectric technology

If you wanna check it out and we’ll see where this looks at in a couple more hours, come back. We are almost three hours into it. And if I push in we’re at 69% humidity and 67 degrees. We’re at 68 degrees and 68 degrees on the humidity or the humidor itself. So, being a degree high off of my humidor or my high grater, it looks like we’re right on.

We actually might be a degree under, which is fine. Again, you can see we’re, you know, right at 68 on the higher for the, or committed humidity control setting for the unit. And my highest is 69. So that would be 68 of the calibration kit that I got from Boda. So, two and a half, three hours in, I mean, we’re pretty much dead on here.

we’ll try it again in, three or four more hours and see if we’ve leveled out. Last check of the evening here, five and a half hours. Since the last time we checked again, I have the humidity on the device set at 68 and the temperature set at 68 temperature on the left, and humidities on the right. And then I have my calibrated hygrometer in the unit itself.

Set the humidity point lower on 4-5%

I’m not a 74 guy, would be much happier either at the target of 68 or a little less. This is easily 4% more than I would care to see. So we’ll have to continue to monitor this over the next number of days.

Could be it’s continuing to settle out and I might need to, put some stuff in it to take up some space. but just as a recap, this unit. Again, self-contained heat cool humidity has three shelves and then its humidity drawer down there with the fan. And I currently have about a hundred cigars in there between, boxes and some of those boxes have the cigars, in them.

And then I have, cigars in the other two drawers. And again, we’re sitting at 74%, according to the calibrated HRO. That I’ve already tested that I had in there to check to see, how they correlate between what the unit says it’s doing and what a calibrated hygrometer says. And we’re currently sitting at 74 and that’s pretty dead-on right there at 74.

So, the temperature is, right at 68 for temperature. It’s a more minor reading at the top, 68 right there to the left. So. We’ll give it a couple more days and I’ll be back to check in after that,

I’ve been messing around with this thing for the last couple of days, because as you saw from the previous time I had it set up, I was. pretty far into the, you know, 74-75% humidity, which was too high for me, maybe that’s okay for you. And, then as you can see, I took a bunch of styrofoam and some other stuff that actually, shipped along with this unit and started stuffing it in all of the empty areas.

I didn’t seem to do too much. So then I started messing around with the actual temperature itself and what I have, I guess, come to find over the last couple of days is this thing is gonna be running somewhere between 4 to 5% higher on the humidity side at points. And other times it. Be much closer to the set point, for instance, I’ve backed down to 65% humidity, 65 degrees.

And if you look at the calibrated, higher sorry, a little too aggressive there. you can see 69. So technically that’s 68 degrees. I’m pretty much dead-on, temperature-wise again, sorry for the glare there. It’s 65 temperature-wise. It’s right on. I’ve moved that higher from the top front, back, middle, front-back, and, the bottom row where the boxes are, all very similar readings.

So a couple of hours ago I took all this stuff out of it and, readjusted the drawers. So there was some even gaping and I think I’m gonna stick with it. 65 on the 65% humidity on the humidor, 65 degrees for the next handful of days. maybe a week just to gauge where it sits and then I’ll post one other follow-up video from here.

Verdict

Now, how does that go from me recommending this product? I think that’s up to you. If you’re somebody that can live with a 4 to 5% humidity swing. If this was a barbecue pit and it was something that was thermostatically controlled four or five degrees, no big deal to me. I deal with 25 to 50-degree temp swings on cookers, depending on what I’m using all the time.

So no big deal, but in this type of instance, especially once you get into the upper humidities, you certainly don’t wanna be growing mold on your cigars. So that’s why I like to keep mine a little bit lower. A lot of folks like to aim for that 70. Percent humidity, 72% humidity. I like mine 70 no more.

Just to make sure that I’m out of that, potential mold growth. I’m sure it’s much more than that, but I. Rather air on the side of caution here. So, for a $850 price tag and up to 400 cigar count, the quality-price ratio is, is probably there for a lot of folks, but again, that’s gonna be up to you if you can deal with temp swings, and maybe it’s just my unit.

I’ve seen some other reviews online, the same unit, and they have had. No issues with temp swings, but I wanted to make sure I was giving you a full review with a calibrated. Hygrometer not just going off of what was on the unit and this is what I’ve been seeing here over the last week or so anyway, that’s wrapping it up.

Seth Lee

Seth’s Humidor is more than just a website, it’s a lifestyle. Seth and his team are always on the lookout for what’s new in cigar culture, and they share their thoughts with you via great videos, reviews, and articles.

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