Cigar Storage
Smoking Room Ventilation and Filtration
Nobody minds the smell of a cigar in the room it is being smoked in. The complaint is always about the landing, the curtains and the following morning. That is a ventilation problem, and it is solved with air, not with candles.
This is the part of a cigar room that gets left to the end and then done badly. An extractor fan in a corner moves a little air and drags the rest of it under the door into the hall. What actually works is a room that is slightly negative against the spaces around it, with enough air changes to clear the smoke, filtration that takes out what the extract cannot, and make-up air brought in deliberately and tempered so the room is still comfortable to sit in.
Keep the room negative
Extract slightly more than you supply and air moves into the room from the house rather than out of it. Everything else follows from that. It means sealing the room properly — the door, the ceiling void, service penetrations, the gap under the architrave nobody thinks about — and giving the make-up air a route you have chosen. A well-sealed door with a drop seal is worth more than a bigger fan.
Air changes and where the grilles go
Cigar smoke is buoyant and it stratifies. Extract wants to be high, at or above head height and over the seating, with supply low and away from it so the room is crossed rather than short-circuited. Grille positions, duct sizes and the number of air changes are a mechanical design job, sized by the ventilation engineer for the volume and how many people will realistically be in there — and worth doing on paper rather than by eye, because an under-sized system is obvious on the first evening and expensive to put right afterwards.
Filtration
Particulates come out with a decent filter. Smell does not — it comes out with activated carbon, and carbon has to be sized for the load and replaced on a schedule rather than fitted and forgotten. An electrostatic precipitator or a recirculating unit has a place where ducting to outside is difficult, in a listed building or a flat, but recirculation alone will never do what extraction does. Where a unit is fitted it wants to be reachable for filter changes without taking joinery off the wall, and we detail an access panel for it as a matter of course.
Make-up air and comfort
Pull six or eight air changes an hour out of a room in January and you will pull the same amount of cold air in somewhere. Tempered make-up air, or heat recovery on the extract, is what stops a smoking room becoming a room nobody sits in after October. It also stops the extract system quietly dragging the humidity out of an adjoining cigar store.
Where the joinery comes into it
Ours is the visible half. Grilles are let into the panelling as brass or timber fretwork rather than screwed on as white plastic. Ducts are boxed into the cornice or the joinery run so the ceiling stays flat. Access panels for filters are made as part of the panelling and open on a push catch. And the cigar store, if there is one, is built as a separate sealed volume off the smoking room, so the room can be aired out without dragging the humidity out of the stock.
A note on rules
Ventilation rates, combustion appliances and anything touching Building Regulations are for your architect and mechanical engineer to sign off, and smoking legislation treats a private house differently from premises open to the public or used for work. We build the room and the joinery; we do not certify the system, and we will tell you where a specialist needs to be involved rather than guess.
Cigar cabinets and humidor tables · Walk-in cigar rooms · Humidity, damp and blued steel
Questions we are asked
How do you stop cigar smoke getting into the rest of the house?
Keep the room slightly negative against the spaces around it. Extract slightly more than you supply and air moves into the room from the house rather than out of it. That means sealing the room properly — the door, the ceiling void, service penetrations — and giving the make-up air a route you have chosen. A well-sealed door with a drop seal is worth more than a bigger fan.
Will a filter get rid of the smell?
Particulates come out with a decent filter. Smell does not — it comes out with activated carbon, and carbon has to be sized for the load and replaced on a schedule rather than fitted and forgotten. Recirculation alone will never do what extraction does.
Where should the extract and supply grilles go?
Cigar smoke is buoyant and it stratifies, so extract wants to be high, at or above head height and over the seating, with supply low and away from it so the room is crossed rather than short-circuited. Grille positions, duct sizes and the number of air changes are a mechanical design job for the ventilation engineer.
Humidity, seasoning and holding sixty-eight — the humidity side of the same problem.
Cedar, and what it actually does — the other half of holding a room steady.