Well thought out Classic Car Storage is a crucial part of preventing corrosion killing old cars. All day and every day Mother Nature is looking at yours and hoping to find an opportunity to reduce it to it’s constituent elements.
She’d like to see your carpets providing a home for insects, your leather supporting a nice fungus, your wiring helping a little mouse build a home. But most of all she wants her iron back. You’ve got the iron. She’s got the water and oxygen that will combine cause corrosion and turn it into rust.
When water meets mild steel it combines with carbon dioxide in the air to make weak carbonic acid. The steel dissolves, prompting the liquid to break down into its constituent parts, mainly hydrogen and oxygen. And the latter likes to bond with the dissolving steel through corrosion to make iron oxide. Rust.
With a relative humidity of 65% the moisture in the air corrosion of unprotected surfaces can be possible. On a rainy day we can see exterior humidity levels of over 90% on our monitoring and without dehumidification interior levels would be similar.
That’s why we run dehumidifiers to control the environment in which our cars are kept. By controlling the relative humidity we can prevent 2 key causes of corrosion; damp, and condensation. How often have we seen cars in garages covered in condensation when, for example, a door is opened into a cold garage on a damp day?
With a target relative humidity of 55% in our dehumidified facility, Mother Nature will need to look elsewhere for her elements. She probably won’t have to look far.
