NewAir NCH250SS01 Humidor Review

By Tony Casas | February 7, 2021

While most of you are gearing up and getting ready for the super bowl, this hockey fan is home, gathering data on his new NewAir 250 count Cigar Humidor.

The NCH250SS01 is a 250 Count cigar humidor that features a stainless steel design, OptiTemp(tm) heating and cooling function, Spanish Cedar shelves, Digital Thermostat, Digital Hygrometer and a nice little lock and key to keep those pesky weasels out of your cigar stash. A few of these features are very appealing to me, but mostly the heating and cooling function. Since I live in a super hot desert climate the temps can get really high here and it’s nice to know that while its boiling outside, my cigars will be kept safe.

Before we dive into the review I wanted to make sure I shared a few things with you. First of all, we partnered with NewAir on this review. That being said we have always took pride in brining you our un-biased, open opinions. With that out of the way, let’s talk about how you can get one of these bad boys yourself. NewAir products are found pretty much anywhere humidors and wine fridges are carried, but you can actually use this direct link: https://glnk.io/llwm/casasfumando in combination with the coupon code FUMANDO to receive a $49.99 discount on your very own NCH250SS01!

Shipping/Packaging:

Let’s start with the shipping time. My order was placed on a Wednesday and my Humidor showed up on my doorstep on that Friday. I’m sure shipping varies based on your location, but they get starts here for getting this to me so quickly. NewAir is located in California, while I’m in West Texas so it’s not the furthest of distances, but it’s also certainly not very close. The New Air NCH250SS01 was shipped in a very large, thick cardboard box. Within this box was layers of more cardboard, and foam completely surrounding the entire machine which was then wrapped in plastic. All aces there. Since there are some movable part within the humidor, NewAir kept those in place with easy-to-remove tape so they wouldn’t shift around during transit. It took me a whole 5 minutes to unpack, plugin, and start rocking with this humidor.

Setup:

After taking the NewAir NCH250SS01 out of the box, it was a simple as removing the shrink wrap from a few of the more scratch-prone pieces, and cleaning the interior. All of the Spanish Cedar shelves come right out for ease of cleaning, and seasoning. After removing the shelves it was as easy as wiping down the interior of the humidor. This step wasn’t really needed since the instead was so clean, I just wanted to make sure I removed any debris before continuing on with my review.

Of course, we’d need to season the humidor first. I wiped down the shelves using a white towel soaked in distilled water. Woah, did a whole mess of the brown/red color come off of the shelves. This is mostly just sawdust embedded within the wood-grain after processing, but its a great idea to make sure you get all that cleaned up so it doesn’t end up on your precious cigars. After seasoning the drawers I dropped them back in and added pre-moist humidification beads to the included clear plastic container and let the humidor sit overnight. I repeated this process a second time just to make sure that we were all right and ready to go.

A few notes here. First, one thing I’ve always liked about the NewAir humidor are the open drawer concept. What the means is that each shelf and draw has slats of Spanish Cedar which allows air and moisture to flow smoothly between layers. I have another humidor with closed draws and I have to monitor each of those a little more closely. Secondly, in the instructions NewAir instructs you not to allow any direct moisture to come in contact with the shelves. This is on your own discretion as I completely ignored that rule as stated in my process above.

Performance:

Now this is where we get to see what the NewAir NCH250SS0 is made of. I monitored the temperature using a pre-calibrated Boveda Butler. The first time the humidor was seasoned the humidity read 79% which level off to about 72% overnight. The second time it read 76% which leveled off to 73% overnight. After leaving the humidor to sit for 3 days the humidity fell to 64% which is right around where I try to keep it. I use 65% beads so they are doing their job well. Each time I opened the humidor door it would drop down to about 62% before rising back up to 64%-65% within and hour so the humidity retain on this humidor is absolutely flawless.

The next test was the temperature test. In a previous humidor by NewAir that I reviewed I had issues with the internal temperature being off from the setting by a few degrees. While that’s a minor annoying, I was curious to see if that has been fixed with this new heating and cooling module. The humidor lets you set a temperature low of 52 Degrees and a high of 74. Depending on the ambient room temperature the humidor will either cool the humidor or heat it to achieve your desired temperature which has to be the coolest feature of these NewAir machines. I like to keep mine at 66 degrees as that is my happy medium. At the 66 degree setting the humidor read…..66! Looks like this one is much more accurate than my previous one. I tried setting this to 55 and the humidor read 54, and at 70 it read 70. Accuracy achieved!

Overall Thoughts:

Again, un-biased thoughts here. The NewAir NCH250SS0 is a wonderful little machine that impressed me yet again. I have a few different electric humidors and the NewAir machines are by far the best performance. Now that they fixed the temperature read issue there isn’ t a whole lot of complaining I can do here. Really the only drawback is you can’t fit taller cigar boxes in between the shelves as they are much closer together as some others, but the isn’t a huge humidor anyways. If you’re purchasing it you’re likely looking to upgrade from a desktop humidor to something larger, but aren’t ready to full-commit to a huger option anyways. The only other gripe is the digital hygrometer included within the humidor was always off by about 2%. I DID NOT calibrate that, so it’s more of just a note. I don’t really use the included hygrometers in humidors anyways as I like the ease of use on the Boveda Butlers. The price is a bit higher than you’d expect in a 250 count humidor, but the features included in this ultra-premium humidor certainly make up for that cost with their performance and ease-of-use. Again, if you are looking at purchasing one for yourself visit:https://glnk.io/llwm/casasfumando in combination with the coupon code FUMANDO to receive a $49.99 discount on your very own NCH250SS01!