A simple handheld hygrometer

with integrated hygrostat

The two environmental factors
that most control the well
feeling of people are
temperature and humidity.
Thermometers can be easily
bought or built, but
hygrometers are somehow a bit
less common. Still, it is
possible to build a simple
electronic hygrometer, that is
inexpensive and quite accurate
- at least, it's many, many
times better than the old
fashioned mechanical things
based on women's hair, horse
tails, swelling pieces of wood,
or any of the many other
measuring principles people
have invented over the
centuries!

The meter described here

employs a Honeywell sensor
IC, based on thin-film polymer
capacitor technology. It's very
convenient because it delivers
a conditioned and rather well
calibrated output signal which
is almost linearly related to the
relative humidity of the air
surrounding it. The sensor does
have a small temperature
coefficient, and a significant
non-linearity at very low
humidity levels. These have
been neglected in the present
simplistic design, but even so
the results are accurate enough.

The climate I live in is very humid. So I purchased a dehumidifier, which is basically a little
machine that sucks the excess water out of the air and deposits it in a tank or drain hose. But
this eager little machine loves to work overtime, and leave the air too dry! So I built my
hygrometer for a dual purpose: It is both a handheld battery-powered hygrometer, and a
controller for a dehumidifier! When controlling the dehumidifier, it takes its power from it,
and so uses no batteries.

A primer on relative humidity

Air can absorb a certain amount of water. This amount is strictly limited, and highly
dependent on temperature. Here is a little table that shows how many grams of water a cubic
meter of standard air at sea level can absorb, at different temperatures (expressed in degrees
Celsius):

T (°C) Water (g/m³)

-----------------------
-20 0.9
-10 2.1
0 4.9
10 9.4
20 17.3
30 30.4

When the amount of water in the air is more than the stated amount for a given temperature,
the air cannot hold that water, and little droplets form, which fall to the ground. That's called
rain! When the air is holding just the maximum possible amount of water, it's said to be
saturated. That's the same as saying that the relative humidity is 100%. So, the percentage of
relative humidity expresses how much water there is in the air, compared with how much
there could be before it starts condensing!

The saturation point can be reached by two ways: One is by adding humidity to the air (such
as with a boiling kettle, a stove burning a fuel containing hydrogen compounds, or a breathing
person). The other is by taking a volume of air with a fixed amount of water in it, and cooling
it down. In both cases, eventually water droplets will form.

If there is any object in the air which is cooler than the air itself, such as a window exposed to
cold outside weather, then condensation will form on the object, even before the air reaches
saturation. The temperature at which an object will become wet is called the dew point, and
depends strictly on the absolute humidity of the air, which in turn is just the amount of water
in the air, regardless of temperature.

Confused? Let me give you an example, with real numbers: Suppose that your home is
heated to 20°C, and that the air happens to contain 10 grams of water per cubic meter.
Considering that the air at 20°C can hold up to 17.3 g/m³, the relative humidity is 58%. This
58% is what my meter would show. By the way, that's quite a comfortable environment to
have.
The dew point would now be near 11°C, because that's the temperature at which 10g/m³
would saturate the air. This means that if anything in your home (such as the windows, a cold
water pipe, the fridge door) gets as cold or colder than 11°C, it will become wet with
condensation!
If your home is very well insulated, that won't happen. But what if you just keep living there,
without ventilating? As soon as you add an additional 7.3g of water for each cubic meter of
air, everything will start getting wet! You might actually see fog forming in the middle of
your living room! Not nice...

So, it's clear that it is necessary to hold a good humidity in your home, in addition to a good
temperature. And that's where this handheld hygrometer comes in, both to monitor the
humidity, and to control a dehumidifier, if necessary. Oh yes, if you live in a very dry climate,
you could control the inverse kind of machine, a humidifier, by reversing the control function!

But how much humidity is good? Well, people feel most comfortable at humidities between
roughly 50 and 70%. Below roughly 50% the lips, ayes and skin dry out, and sparks from
static charge start happening. Above 70% you feel sticky hot as soon as you start moving, and
clammy cold as soon as you sit down for a while.
Objects instead like lower humidities: At 70%, some fungus can already grow on many
surfaces in the home, fed just by dust and airborne humidity! Above 80%, fungus is very
active (and smelly!). So, it's better to stay below perhaps 60%, where fungus is mostly
inactive. But too little isn't good either: Below about 40% paper becomes brittle, wood can
crack (ask any piano repairer!), and sparks from electrostatic charges can kill electronic
equipment. So, I think that the optimal relative humidity to keep in one's home is roughly 50
to 60%.

The circuit

Here is the schematic diagram of my hygrometer. You can click on it to get a larger, better,
printable version. Let's start from the right side: A 9V battery powers the circuit through a
pushbutton and a diode, or alternatively it can get power from a dehumidifier or power
supply, via a DIN connector and another diode. The external power can be anything from
about 8 Volt up to 30 Volt, but the nominal, well tested value is 12V. It doesn't need to be
regulated - in my dehumidifier I installed a simple power supply with a 9V transformer,
bridge rectifier and 1000uF filter capacitor.

There is a small 5V regulator, which powers the voltage-sensitive circuitry. Please note that
there are different pin numbering conventions for the 78L05! So check the data sheet, and if
you see a disagreement between my pin numbers and what the data sheet indicates, identify
the pins by input, output and ground, rather than numbers...

The regulated 5V feed the HIH3610 relative humidity sensor. The output of the chip, which
doesn't have a great current sourcing capability, is buffered by a low power operational
amplifier. From here, a classical galvanometer is driven, with one adjustment for the zero
point and another for the gain. If you can't get a 50 microampere meter like I did, you can use
a different one, adjusting the values of R2 and perhaps R1 as needed to get it to full deflection
at 100% humidity. I drew a new meter scale on the computer, printed it and installed it in the
meter, so it looks quite good and is practical to use.

The buffered voltage representing humidity is also applied to the second section of U1, which
works as a Schmitt trigger comparing the present humidity to a reference value coming from a
potentiometer. With the values shown, the set point can be adjusted from about 40% to
80%RH. According to this comparison, this op amp controls a transistor which in turns
controls a power relay installed inside the dehumidifier. R10 sets the hysteresis between
switch-on and switch-off. The 330k value shown gives roughly 5%RH hysteresis, which is
good for accurate control but a bit tight if you use a powerful dehumidifier in a small room. In
that case, better reduce the resistor to 220k, or 150k, which will give proportionally larger
hysteresis.

The dehumidifier connected to J1 should put pins 2 and 4 to ground. It should provide a
supply of roughly 12V at pin 3, and should have the coil of a 12V relay connected between
the 12V and pin 1. There should be a freewheeling diode in parallel with the relay coil
(cathode to +12V).

If you don't want to control any external device, of course you can eliminate R6 to 12, D1 to
D3, Q1, and J1. If you use a very sensitive meter (less than 30µA full scale), you can even
eliminate U1, and feed the meter directly from the sensor. Adjust R2 up in that case. The
meter becomes really simple in this case!

Mechanical construction

I built my hygrometer
into an inexpensive
plastic project box. The
pushbutton was installed
so that it can be easily
pressed with the thumb.
The sensor was installed
in a rather fancy support
made on my lathe from
black polyamide. The tip
of it, complete with
sensor, can be seen in this
magnified photo. The
sensor is sensitive to
light, giving wrong
readings when exposed to
direct sunlight or other
strong light sources!
That's why I designed this
rather fancy support,
shown here without the
top cover. It allows air to
freely circulate around the sensor, while completely cutting out any light when the cap is on.

Of course, you don't need to to it this way! I did it just because I love to play with my lathe!
(But next time I will sharpen the cutting tool in order to get a smoother surface!). Any mount
that keeps the sensor reasonably dark, in good contact with ambient air, and far away from
any heat source, will do.

I did not make a printed circuit board. The circuit is so simple that it wasn't worth the effort!
Instead I assembled it on a piece of prototyping board.

Calibration

You need at least two humidity references to do the calibration of this meter. It's best if one of
these gives near to zero humidity, because then you can set and forget the zero adjustment,
instead of going forth and back several times between the zero and the gain trimpots. I did it
in the following way:

I got a large bag (about half a kilogram, probably pure overkill!) of silica gel, encased in
fabric, and dried it in my electric oven for several hours at slightly over 100°C. Then I placed
the silica gel in a closed plastic bag, let it cool, and then poked the sensor into the bag, sealing
the bag against the sensor mount with rubber bands. I let it sit there for half an hour. This
method produces a humidity very close to zero. I set the zero trimpot (R4) so that the meter
shows just a tad above zero.

Then I took some distilled water, placed it in a clean dish, took the silica gel out of the bag,
placed the dish with water in, and re-sealed the bag, with the sensor rather close over the
water surface. I let that stand for several hours, so that all temperatures would equalize and
the system would reach equilibrium. Then I set the gain adjustment trimpot (R1) so that the
meter shows exactly 100%.

You can check the linearity by replacing the distilled water with saturated salt solutions. Each
kind of salt gives a very specific humidity. But you need pure salts! Unfortunately table salt
comes laced with additives that make it unsuitable for calibration. But if you can get pure
sodium chloride, that should give something near 75%RH. Lithium chloride gives close to
30%, if my memory isn't kidding me, but check the precise values on some other web site if
you want to do these linearity checks!

From: homo ludens electronicus.