At 03:26 PM 6/5/2008, you wrote:
>Also Nathan, I use a small hair blow-dryer to dry things out--used on
>low heat, not too close to the components--when I'm recording around
>Hawai`i, where wet conditions are a normal hazard, a blow-dryer has
>become essential in my traveling gear bag.
>David
>
A trick developed well before 1950 for tropical situations (hot, near
100% humidity) by Profs Arthur Allen and Paul Kellogg was to keep all
equipment, when not in use, hanging in a small closet -- especially
overnight. On the closet floor you place a low wattage table lamp
turned on, 15-40 watts is fine, and keep the door, or closet
curtains, as closed as possible around it all. The electric heat
warms the small volume of air in the top of the closet to about 8-12
degrees F higher than the incoming ambient air, making the relative
humidity of the gently passing air favorable to drying everything
out. Slow, but sure.
I used this trick with all my camera gear and Cornell's Nagra II and
mics for a month in Guangdong Province, China, May 1984, (and later
repeatedly in Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Hawaii over a 6
year period), and it worked extremely well, no problems for the
month of recording I did in China, except for one: It proved to be
impossible to explain to the hotel maid(s) the purpose of the
mislocated table lamp, and every day for the month, on returning from
a long field day, I would have to remove it from the (useless)
bedside table, and reconnect it to an outlet nearer the closet, for
the next critical night of equipment drying. BTW my max-min
thermometer for the 30 days registered a range of only 81-85 Deg F.,
while the humidity hovered near 100% the whole time. I have always
wondered what the maid told herself every day was going on with that
table lamp . . .
-- best regards, Marty
Martin C. Michener, Ph.D.,
President, MIST Software Assoc. Inc., P. O. Box 269, Hollis, NH
03049 http://www.enjoybirds.com/
Faculty, Landscape Institute, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA http://arboretum.harvard.edu/programs/ld/faculty.html
Course: Summer 655A, entitled "Plant Identification in New
England" http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k34018
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