Moisture Meters

chillyspoon

I need to buy a moisture meter and there appear to be three distinct price brackets:

- budget: < 100-ish (this includes a broad range..)
- mid: 100-300-ish
- upper: > 300-ish

My level of use will be seasoning rough sawn boards indoors until they're ready to use so I expect that a budget meter will be sufficient.

There are a few ancient threads out there on Boards but nothing particularly recent.

Caulfield have several products in the budget range but I noticed that they have a Stanley at 68 euro (0-77-030 - https://www.caulfieldindustrial.com/p/stanley-0-77-030-moisture-meter/p-e10114) which appears to be the same as one going for 30 euro from Irish Forestry Products: http://www.irishforestryproducts.ie/measuring---marking.html ("Stanley Moisture Meter - INT077030")

So I'm wondering what moisture meters you guys are using and if there are any recommendations or "for god's sake don't buy this one"s!?

Thanks.

chillyspoon

Just to close out this vibrant thread - I ended up getting one of these from Jackson's in Kilcoole; works fine:

http://www.jjacksontools.com/en/cmt-digital-moisture-meter

Effects

I've been following this thread waiting for a response!
Any pros or cons to the one you got?

chillyspoon

It's extremely easy to use but I've got no basis for comparison to know exactly how accurate it is.

I'll compare with my Dad's one (another cheapo one) next time I'm at his place to see if they produce similar results and I'll also compare results between some extremely old and dry framing stock versus some kiln dried beech I've got. I'll post back the results.

tabby aspreme

Try the moisture meter in a few places in your house for comparison, such as inside the hotpress 5-6%, the top of doors in different rooms 11-13% , top of an entrance door 13-15% and then roof timber in a shed or garage 17-20% , by trying the doors in different rooms you should notice the difference depending on the level of heating in them.

dathi

chillyspoon wrote: »

It's extremely easy to use but I've got no basis for comparison to know exactly how accurate it is. .

cut a small piece of wood that will fit in your oven, check moisture level with your meter then weigh the piece of wood on kitchen scales and place in oven for couple hours, take it out every 20 mins and check the weight when you get to the stage where it doesn't lose any more weight over the 20 mins it is oven dry. weigh again and the moisture level is the % difference between the first weight and the final weight then check against measure you got with meter . ps. do it when mrs chilly is out of house;)

chillyspoon

dathi wrote: »

cut a small piece of wood that will fit in your oven, check moisture level with your meter then weigh the piece of wood on kitchen scales and place in oven for couple hours, take it out every 20 mins and check the weight when you get to the stage where it doesn't lose any more weight over the 20 mins it is oven dry. weigh again and the moisture level is the % difference between the first weight and the final weight then check against measure you got with meter

.

Good idea - I'll do that.

dathi wrote: »

ps. do it when mrs chilly is out of house;)

I'm the cook in our house so it's a case of my oven -> my rules!

Effects

I just bought one as well. I'll test it when it arrives. Rather than use the oven for these tests I dry it out completely on top of the stove and then weigh.

Effects

My meter arrived yesterday. Tested it on some ash. The ash tree was felled last year, cut into large sections but left outside. 5 weeks ago I split it and put it in a covered but external wood store.
It measured 19.1%. After drying it out on top of the stove for the day it now measures 7.2%