chaosdsm

IF you have moisture problems inside your car that does not come from leakage or bad door/window seals, this might help!

Living in Florida, and having my car outside, I've always had problems with moisture in my cars. Doesn't matter that my cars have always been kept under a carport, anytime there's high humidity, long rainy days, and especially when we get hours of dense fog, the insides of the car gets moist and clammy. It didn't matter if it was a brand new car like when I bought my 2001 Hyundai Accent in May of 2001, or a used car like my mom's Hyundai Sonata or my current HHR, always had the same trouble.

I used to deal with this by buying DampRid. I would get the closet bags with the built in hanger & would usually hang two of them off the post on the head rests. This is a viable option, but not a cheap option anymore.... They used to be about $8 for a box of 3. I would usually wait till they had the bonus box that had 1 free pack for same price & buy as many as I could. These days they run about $13 to $18 for a box of 3 depending on where you buy them and rarely come with a bonus pack anymore. At best they only last about 3 months during the dryest part of the year, & even then, if you only use one pack in the car it doesn't help much. During the worst part of the rainy season / heavy fog events, they only last about 3 weeks & that's with adding a 3rd pack....

So, a little over a year ago, I bought a 2 pack of "wisedry" 500g rechargeable desiccant on Amazon. At the time, it seemed like it might work, and to some degree it did.... But last month, we had one of those 40+ hour continuous rain events here, & the seats were cold, moist, & clammy when I got in a few hours after the rain stopped. I had just recharged the 2 packs the day before the rain started. They both weighed about 510g - 520g each after recharging. When I got back home from the shopping trip that I took after the rain had stopped, I brought the packets in, & they both weighed about 680g. Anything over 650g is considered as "saturated". So they are working, but 1000g of desiccant was not even close to enough to do the job. One of them would probably be perfect for a large gun-safe though...

I did a little experiment.... I have a half gallon of loose 3mm-5mm blue silica beads which I normally use to dry the air coming out of my air compressor. After recharging the two 500g packs again, I put them, and the half gallon of loose bead in my car overnight, next day it was bone dry inside and only about 1/2 of the blue beads had shifted towards pink: pink indicates saturated & ready to recharge. It took about 3 weeks till about 3/4 of the beads were fully pink.

I went on line & found some estimates that say you would likely need between 2000g & 2500g of desiccant to keep the inside of a car the size of an HHR dry to the touch. 1gal is about 3400 grams, so about 0.75gal is needed... SO, back to Amazon & I found some stainless steel commercial kitchen strainer baskets that are roughly 3.9" diameter x 5.3" high, with attached locking lids. The holes on the sides are about 1mm, the holes on the bottom are about 2mm, so most of my beads will have no problem staying inside and there's no barrier to moisture. Only problem... every packet of silica gel I find in shipping boxes, food packets, etc... I cut open & add to my stockpile, & some of those include smaller 1mm - 2mm beads which just fall through the bottom &/or sides...




The gallon container cost me about $30 5 years ago, I bought 4 of the strainer baskets for $48, while the 2ct pack of 500g packets was $21 last year. So for about $100 I have a permanently rechargeable solution vs 12 - 18 months of DampRid... After drying the beads again in my oven for 3 hours(2hrs heat + 1hr to cool), I cut open the two 500g cloth bags (clear, non-indicating silica gel beads), and mixed them in with the blue beads I have. I filled 3 of the containers to the top, they hold about 870g per container which is about 2.5x more than the two 500g packets. I could not find enough bead to fill the 4th container, but once I find the other half gallon of beads that I have, I'll have all 4 of these in my car! Should be more than enough to keep it dry inside!

The ONLY problem with the 500g packets(and the main reason I didn't just buy 1 or two more pair of them), you had to weigh the packets to find out if they need to be recharged. Now, all I have to do is look at the beads & see if the blue ones have turned pink, & I don't even need to remove the beads from the containers, just put the whole thing in the oven at 300F for 2 hours & let em cool an hour before putting back in the car!

firemangeorge

Wow. I live in a very humid area of the Gulf Coast. 45 years of driving and all I’ve ever needed was to run the defroster to dry out the cabin air.

PulpFriction

Silca gel kitty litter might be a cheap source

Another option - I put a dishpan with calcium chloride ice melting salt in the cab of my car when storing for the winter. It's what the crystals in tubs are, I think.

tiapetra

In S Florida here and probably the same 40+ hour rain, but the defroster with A/C took care of any dampness inside.
Never did feel abnormal anyway. Windows do fog up in the mornings this time of year.

chaosdsm

Wish I was as lucky as you guys. Only car I ever owned that didn't get damp inside under these conditions was my '84 VW Scirocco back in the late 80's & early 90's.