So as cigar smokers we all want to keep tabs on the humidity levels and temperature to make sure our settings are ideal. There are of course several items on the market for doing such and can be placed around your humidor so they can be seen easily when you walk up to the humidor or when you open it and peak inside. This is all well fine and good if you want to know the level of humidity at either the top of your desktop humidor or the front of your stand up humidor or if you want to lose a multitude of humidity by opening the humidor every time you want to get a reading. But what about those of us who don’t want to get up off the couch to check? Seriously though,many of us cigar smokers are in essence collectors and become very neurotic about our collections. We like to monitor the readings throughout the day and it would be great to do this even when not at home. This is where the Cigar Scanner WiFi Hydrometer and Thermometer comes in.

I received the Cigar Scanner WiFi Hydrometer and Thermometer at the beginning of December and got to work setting it up. Now the system is a bit old fashioned having a standalone gateway (I mean this is 2019 after all) and the other thing that I didn’t care for was that it did come with the USB cord to connect to the gateway but no power block to plug it into the wall. So after rummaging through all of my old iPhone chargers I managed to dig one up that wasn’t being used and plugged it in. Now I could say that getting the gateway connected was as simple as stated in the instructions but that just wouldn’t be true, after about two hours or so of fighting to get it to connect and resetting the gateway and admin passwords I did finally have success. From there a simple press of the button activates the sensor and in the humidor it went.

Once I finally had that all connected I opened up the Cigar Scanner app which, until getting this, I had not used before. The app itself is pretty well laid out, there’s a social side to it for posting photos and giving ratings of what you’re smoking, a tools section with a decent amount of information, a my humidor section which is where you will find the readouts from the hydrometer/thermometer as well as adding cigars to your collection so you know what you have on hand. Don’t want to type in all that info for each cigar you have? Not a problem, just take a photo of the cigar and let the app figure out what you have. But back to the hydrometer.

I chose to test this out in my newer large floor humidor to make sure I could move the sensor around and check how it would read in various areas. Each time I moved it I made sure to move my standalone Xicar hydrometer as well the attached Cigar Oasis hydrometer sensor to verify its readings. After a month of moving the sensors around and tracking the data from all three units I found that the Cigar Scanner WiFi Hydrometer and Thermometer read accurately and I had no problems with losing connection to my phone when checking the reading from the app.

In all I’m pleased with the functionality of the hydrometer and thermometer, given that it is a bit odd to have a standalone gateway and the set up is a bit tricky, it still wasn’t that bad to deal with. The app is a fun novelty to play around with, keep track of your collection in a relativity easy manner and can track your your humidity and temperature readings anytime you like. You can even look at the readouts in graph form by day or for a given length of time that you choose to look for unwanted fluctuations. While the $99.00 price tag does seem a bit high for what it is at least, unlike Cigar Oasis, there isn’t a subscription required to utilize the product and app after you’ve purchased it. So if you’re in the market for a WiFi enabled hydrometer/thermometer system the Cigar Scanner WiFi Hydrometer and Thermometer is a safe bet.

Price: $99.00

Available for purchase from various outlets

Rating: 4.4 out of 5 pints