Govee or Shelly H&T for humidor monitoring: how I split mine
The two sensor families The Cabinet supports. Both work great. Here's why we picked these two, what each does well, and how I run them across four humidors.
TL;DR. Govee H5179 and Shelly H&T Gen 3 are both excellent humidor sensors and both work great with The Cabinet. We support these two (and other Govee WiFi models) because they’re affordable, available globally, and have clean cloud APIs we can integrate against without drama. The Govee is cheap, tiny, and just reports to the cloud — you read the number on your dashboard. The Shelly costs more, lasts longer on a battery, and has an e-ink display you can read at a glance through the glass of a cabinet humidor. Pick whichever fits the box, the budget, and the morning routine. They land in the same dashboard either way.
I open the Daniel Marshall in the morning to grab a cigar. The Shelly sitting inside reads 64% / 19°C on its e-ink display the moment the lid lifts. No button press, no app, no nothing. Lid closed two seconds later. On with the day.
If it were the small cabinet humidor with the glass door, I wouldn’t even need to open it. The e-ink panel stays on without drawing power and reads cleanly from any angle, so the number is right there behind the glass, twenty-four hours a day. That detail doesn’t show up on a spec sheet. It matters every morning anyway.
The desktop humidor (smallest one, 25-count, lives by the keyboard) runs a Govee H5179. No display on the unit itself; it just sits inside the box and reports to the cloud. If I want a number, I open the dashboard. Different design philosophy, different price. Both fine.
Why we support these two specifically
There are easily a hundred WiFi hygrometers on the market. We support Govee and Shelly because they hit a sweet spot of three things, none of them romantic:
Affordable. Govee starts around $15, Shelly around $40. You can outfit a five-humidor collection without thinking too hard.
Available. Both ship globally, from the manufacturer or Amazon or any number of resellers. Nothing rare or stuck-in-stock-rotation about either.
Cleanly integrable. Both manufacturers run real APIs that don’t move under us. Setup is one app, one QR code, one WiFi handshake. Nothing exotic, nothing brittle.
That’s the whole story. They’re not “the two best humidor sensors on the planet.” They’re the two that work, are easy to get, and slot into the dashboard cleanly. We’re talking to other manufacturers about adding more (sensor requests welcome at hello@thecabinet.club). For now: these two cover the field.
What they share
Both use capacitive humidity-sensor technology factory-calibrated against saturated-salt reference solutions, the same class of sensor every modern small-format hygrometer uses
Either is meaningfully more accurate, more current, and more diagnosable than any analog dial hygrometer you’ve ever owned. That’s the leap that actually matters.
The Govee
The Govee H5179 is what I run in three of four humidors. $20–30 depending on the sale
It’s just fine. That’s the appropriate amount of enthusiasm. A consumer WiFi sensor that works, fails occasionally in low-stakes ways, and is cheap enough to replace when it eventually goes. You buy three, you keep one in a drawer as a spare, you stop thinking about it.
The honest tradeoff with no display: you can’t glance at the box and see a number. You have to open an app or the dashboard. For a humidor sitting on the desk three feet from your laptop that’s nothing; the dashboard is already open. For a humidor in another room you have a moment of “let me check on my phone” instead of “lift the lid, look, close the lid.” Some people prefer that. It keeps the cigars out of sight more.
The Shelly
Different breed. Shelly makes prosumer home-automation kit aimed at people running their own dashboards and direct webhooks
The thing I love most, and didn’t expect to love, is the e-ink display. Always sharp, always readable, no backlight needed. You crack the lid of the humidor to take a cigar and the reading is right there. For a glass-door cabinet, you don’t even open it — the sensor sits behind the glass with the reading visible from any angle, all day, no power involved. Compared to having no display at all (the Govee approach) or an LCD that only lights up on a button press (most other models), e-ink is the small luxury you keep noticing.
For walk-ins or hard-to-reach sensor placements, the longer battery life is the obvious reason to pay more. For a glass-door cabinet humidor or any box where you’d rather not pull out a phone every morning, the e-ink display is the surprise reason. The Setup app is more powerful than Govee’s, with more knobs you don’t need; takes maybe five minutes instead of three. Local-webhook configuration is possible if you want to avoid the manufacturer cloud entirely (we currently poll via Shelly Cloud; direct webhook support is on the roadmap).
Side-by-side
| Govee H5179 | Shelly H&T Gen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ~$20–30 | ~$40–50 |
| Sensor accuracy | ±3% RH, ±0.3°C (manufacturer spec) | Capacitive, same sensor class |
| Battery | 3× AA, ~7 months | 4× AA (LR6), ~1 year |
| Display | None — read on the dashboard | Always-readable e-ink |
| WiFi | 2.4GHz, direct to Govee Cloud | 2.4GHz + Bluetooth, direct to Shelly Cloud |
| Setup | 3 minutes via Govee Home app | 5 minutes via Shelly app |
How I split mine
Three Govees in the desktop, the travel humidor, and the small cabinet for redundancy. One Shelly in the Daniel Marshall, where I want the e-ink and the long battery. If I added a walk-in tomorrow I’d put Shellys at the corners and Govees in between for spatial coverage at sensible cost.
Mixing brands is fine. The Cabinet treats every sensor identically once it’s added; nothing about the dashboard changes based on which manufacturer it came from. So pick by box, pick by budget, pick by whether you want to read a number on the unit itself or just on the dashboard. They both just work. The choice isn’t a high-stakes decision — it’s an aesthetic and ergonomic one.
The point that’s actually worth repeating
The leap that matters isn’t from one of these to the other. It’s from analog to digital. Even the salt-tested dial hygrometer in the most expensive Cuban-style humidor you can buy drifts within months. The cheapest sensor in this comparison reads more accurately, updates in real time, keeps a history you can scroll back through, and tells you what your humidor is actually doing instead of what it was doing the last time you bothered to check.
You can add either sensor to The Cabinet the same way: pair it through the manufacturer app, drop it into your account, let the dashboard start filling in. Same VPD, same dew-point margin, same alarm thresholds, same trend history, same AI Curator reading your data over coffee while you sleep.
That’s the whole product, and it works on either of these sensors. Both, if that’s how you want to play it.
— Finn
Sources
- Govee — manufacturer site
Govee's WiFi-connected hygrometer-thermometer product line, including the H5179 referenced in this post. Sensors report temperature and humidity to Govee's cloud over WiFi; The Cabinet polls the Govee cloud API for readings.
- Shelly — manufacturer site
Shelly's WiFi-connected temperature and humidity sensors (Plus H&T and H&T Gen 3). Battery-powered, sleep between readings, report to Shelly Cloud and optionally to direct webhook targets. Premium-tier hardware aimed at home-automation users.
- Hygrometer — Wikipedia
Reference for hygrometer technology. Modern small-format sensors use capacitive humidity sensors with manufacturer-rated accuracy in the ±2–3% RH range, calibrated against saturated-salt reference solutions.
- Humidor — Wikipedia (storage section)
Reference for humidor monitoring practice, including the role of digital hygrometers in modern collections.