Kai

Bag tip: prop it with a couple of chopsticks so the plastic is not touching the leaves, and open it for an hour a day. Otherwise you can end up with fungal spots on top of everything else.

One thing that quietly slows everything down: nutrients. A brand new coco and sphagnum substrate is close to inert. Once the cleanup crew and some leaf litter have been breaking down for a few months, growth picks up noticeably by itself. Until then a very dilute foliar feed every few weeks helps, as long as you keep it weak enough to be safe for whatever will eventually live in there.

The power argument gets used to justify the Pi more than the numbers support. A Pi 5 idles around 4W, an N100 box around 7 to 10W. Call it 5W of difference, which at typical residential rates is somewhere near 6 to 10 a year. That is not the deciding factor for a machine you will keep for five years.

Also check whether the new spot puts it near a radiator or in the draught from a door. Figs sulk about cold air on the leaves and the timing would look identical to a light problem.

The recirculate point catches a lot of people. It feels like it should keep the damp out, but it just recycles the wettest air in the car back over the glass. Fresh air plus AC clears fog several times faster.

This is also why you cycle for four to six weeks before the animal arrives. The bloom passes, the plants root in, the cleanup crew builds numbers, and you find out about any condensation or drainage problems while there is nothing living in there to worry about.

It is the Mpemba effect and physics still cannot explain it at all, it is one of those genuinely open mysteries.

If four to six weeks of manual treatment does not get you there, systemic granules watered into the soil will. They are genuinely effective on mealybugs because the insect drinks the plant. I would only reach for them after the manual approach has failed, and not at all if you have a cat that chews leaves or a toddler who puts things in their mouth.

Also check what you are measuring with and where. Cheap analog dial hygrometers are frequently off by 15 or 20 points and they respond slowly, so a reading of 40 might be a reading of 60 taken badly.

Use a digital probe, put the sensor at animal height rather than at the top of the tank, and if you can, calibrate it once with the salt test. Half the humidity panics I see turn out to be instrument problems.

Draining the tin was what fixed my chilli. I had been treating tinned tomatoes as one ingredient rather than as an ingredient plus most of a cup of water.

Two other things worth checking:

Leaf litter depth. Springtails need a damp layer of decaying material to live in, and if yours has broken down over two months and not been topped up, their habitat has quietly disappeared. I keep at least two inches of magnolia or oak leaves and add a handful monthly.

Which isopods you added. Powder oranges and dwarf whites are gentle and happy in the same damp conditions. Some of the larger species prefer drier setups, and keepers adjust the tank to suit them, which is what actually harms the springtails. If you changed your misting routine for the isopods, that is your culprit rather than the animals themselves.

Small thing that might help the pattern make sense: nothing about you changes much here. Exhaled air is at body temperature and saturated whether you are hydrated, out of breath, or freezing cold. So when the fog changes and you did not, it is the atmosphere doing it.

Whatever you choose, do the substrate barrier properly. Fine window screen or a layer of fibreglass mesh between the drainage layer and the substrate, cut to the exact footprint with no gaps at the edges. Substrate washing down into the drainage layer is the failure mode that eventually forces a teardown regardless of which method you picked.

The one size rule is the bit people skip and then wonder why the new pot stays wet for a fortnight. Two inches of extra diameter is plenty.

Also make sure they stayed covered in liquid. Beans poking above the surface stop cooking and stay hard while the ones underneath go soft, and then it looks like the whole batch failed. Give them a stir at the halfway point and top up if needed.

Also check where the jar sits. A cold windowsill or a draughty spot makes the surface cool faster than the bulk and encourages exactly that top crust. Somewhere with a steady temperature away from the window is better, even if hiding it in a cupboard feels less scientific.