Acclimate / Shop Drying - in shop or house

[Brad Ridgway]

Everything i read says to let wood shop dry in the shop.

But being in florida where the humidity gets pretty bad, i'm thinking that for stuff destined for the house (i.e. a tressle table i'm hoping to start soon), it would be better to let it dry in the house where i run the A/C much lower (78-80) instead of the 86+ i keep the shop at)


Is my thinking right or wrong (let's assume for the sae of argument that the misses doesn't care if i stack it in the dining room)

thx
-brad

[Lee Schierer]

Your thinking is correct. It is best to let the wood acclimate where it will be used, assuming SWMBO will let you store piles of lumber in the living room.:D.

[Jason White]

I've wondered about this myself.

What if I'm building a project that might take several weeks to build and will therefore "live" in the shop for a long time?

I would imagine that whatever benefit there was to letting the wood acclimate indoors would be lost after a certain amount of time.

Jason




Your thinking is correct. It is best to let the wood acclimate where it will be used, assuming SWMBO will let you store piles of lumber in the living room.:D.

[Chris Friesen]

What if I'm building a project that might take several weeks to build and will therefore "live" in the shop for a long time?

Take the pieces back in the house between shop sessions. At the very least, cut the joinery and assemble the joints on a whole subassembly at once if possible.

[Jeff Duncan]

Jason.....it doesn't matter where we store the wood, in our area the humidity swings are going to get to the piece regardless. Unless your also going to upgrade your HVAC system so that the air is the same temp and humidity level all year, your at the mercy of the weather.
Having said that if one lived in a place where the weather was much more predictable, (stable), it wouldn't hurt to have the wood acclimated to the conditions it would reside in.
JeffD

[Frank Drew]

Brad,

Why not reset your shop a.c. to something much closer to your house's?

[John Thompson]

It would indeed be wise to let it acclimate in the house if... you can get the individual pieces to the shop and work them quickly and get the result back in the house. If they have to stay out in the shop a few days they will acclimate to the shop and they you will again have to acclimate them to the house.

I just used 140 board feet of QSWO on a desk-hutch. I would be dreaming to think my wife would allow 140 board feet in the house to begin with and let me drag it back and forth between there the the shop. My solution here in Georgia is I let it acclimate in the shop.. work it and then take it inside as I don't have a large variance in shop and home humidity 9 months of the year but... I certainly do in summer which has arrived here.

So.. I build from late August until late May (just finishing a project) and lay off in summer. I will build a work-bench to sell and tinker with some out-door furniture but... not pieces I take inside unless it is a one day build.

Good luck...

Sarge..

[Andrew Hughes]

Here in so cal.I lay off building any thing complex during the summer. My shop has zero insulation.This summer i am starting on a outside deck with some bench seats.Should keep me satisfied.Picked up some port orford cedar nice stuff smells great.Like ginger.

[Lee Mitchell]

Just some thoughts....

Other than things like flooring, in my humble opinion, it really doesn't matter, once the moisture has equalized in the wood, regardless of where it's stored. (Within reason, that is.)

Good building and finishing techniques allow for expansion/contraction from changes in humidity levels. After all, before the days of central heating/cooling systems and poorly insulated houses, furniture was exposed to a wide range in heat and humidity.

Over the years, I've had furniture in non-climate controlled areas for various reasons. Stored some my grandmother's things in a outbuilding on the farm, for example. The only time we've ever had a problem, was when there was a leak over a small table stored in a shed.

There haven't been rapid and drastic enviromental changes from making these moves from place to place. Doubt this thinking would apply when taking something from NC to soutwest Texas, for example.

Again, just some thoughts for consideration.

Lee in NC

[David Keller NC]

While this seems logical, it's actually not (acclimation in the house). What you want to do is acclimate the lumber in the environment that you intend to square it, cut the joints, and assemble it, not where you eventually want to use it.

The part about where you want to use it is where good design practice comes in - construct your pieces so that wood movement is accomodated.

The reason for acclimation in the first place is to prevent the sort of disaster where you joint, plane, rip, and crosscut your parts to size, and cut the joinery, and then get called away to do something less fun (like go to work). If you do this with lumber that's not acclimated to your shop environment, then when you return you may find that your carefully flattened parts are no longer flat, and that the joints that were such a nice, not-too-tight, not-too-loose fit no longer go together without a struggle.

This is why it's best to have a stable, conditioned environment in your shop, at least for the length of time that you allow the lumber to acclimate and you start and finish your project.

Our ancestors did not have this luxury, but they were often doing WW for a living, so parts didn't set around long enough to have this problem. Moreover, I suspect (but can't prove) that parts weren't all cut to a list, then the piece was assembled. Instead, parts were cut from partially-prepared stock on an as-needed basis, and fit to the space on the piece under construction. So there was little opportunity for wood movement to create a problem.

[Brad Ridgway]

thx for the feedback...


fyi - reason for not AC'ing the shop at low temps is the cost... keeping it in high 80s its currently only running a little bit late afternoon. To keep is below 80 would increase my bill a lot running most of the day (july/august would be the worst). (its an older lower seer unit i pulled from my house)

[David Keller NC]

Brad - Irrespective of your personal comfort, it's not the temperature so much as it is the relative humidity at that particular temperature that affects whether your wood is taking in or giving up moisture (in other words, whether it's in equilibrium).

Even though the absolute humidity in terms of lbs of water per lb of dry air is a lot higher at 90 degrees and 40% R.H. than it is at 70 degrees and 40% R.H., it is the difference between the wood's moisture content and the saturation potential of the air, measured in dew point or %R.H. that drives the change.

[David Perata]

I run a dehumidifier unit in three shops that I store wood in and work it there. The primo wood conditioning room is kept at 40 percent humidity. The other two shops range around 45-50 percent cause they're larger. I have inexpensive temp & humidity gauges in all rooms that I bought at the local Menards. It's not all spot on but it seem to do the trick.

[Brad Ridgway]

Yep, understood on the temp vs humidity. I know i was implying temp, but real thought is that the A/C removes a lot of water from the air when its running. I bought a dehumidifier at Lowes last year with the intent of using it more in the shop, but it tended to make the place really hot, ran a lot and the wife decided to borrow it for damp locations in the house.

I may steal it back.

I will look into humidity gauges (right now i just have a wood moisture meter). I wanted to get some 1-wire sensors including humidity and tie them into my Elk M1 panel but i don't think there's any direct integration there yet... (i'm a home automatin wanna be - i can turn on my air compressor with my iphone - i know you're all impressed now right? j/k!),

thx again
-brad