What was that about cutting corners Baz?

Well my humidity controller arrived from China today, so I wired it up just as a means of monitoring the humidity not controlling it, and it settled at about 72%, 'good sign' I thought, how wrong I was. The fridge had been turned off whilst I was waiting for the humidity controller to arrive so when I first turned everything on the temp in the fridge was about 19C and the compressor was running and dehumidifying as it did so, as soon as it got down to temp the compressor turned off and the humidity immediately started increasing at quite a staggering rate so much so that the controller went off scale ie over 100%, so back to the drawing board or back to Phil's article on how to convert a fridge for some inspiration. In his article Phil mentioned putting trays of salt in the fridge to absorb moisture out of the air but that made no difference or not enough to dent the high humidity, he also referred to putting a heat source in the fridge (I know this sounds incredibly counter intuitive but a side effect of refridgeration is dehumidification, so adding a heat source means that the compressor is running for longer, more electricity being used tho') so I am now at the stage of adding a heat source in the fridge, a low energy light bulb, being triggered at 60% humidity and I am hoping that by altering the trigger points of the temp and humidity controllers I will find a happy medium but I think that as Phil's article points out that I will have to invest in another humidity controller to run a humidifier on days of low humidity (I bought a sonic humidifier from Argos today £29.99).

As can be seen I am very much at the Heath Robinson lash up stage, I will tidy up the whole affair when I get to a point that I feel no further intervention will be required.  I have to say that both the controllers are 230v ie mains voltage so potentially lethal, you can buy 24v dc versions of the controllers but then you will need a transformer but it would definitely be a safer way of doing things. As I have been writing this I have been tweaking set points, I may have to look at the hysteresis function on the controller which may smooth out some of the peaks in humidity.