Federal climate data confirmed what a lot of members already knew from watching their own equipment run harder than usual this summer: July was hot almost everywhere, with every state coming in at least a degree above its twentieth-century average and more than a dozen posting one of their five warmest Julys on record. Independent climate trackers put July 2024 as the warmest July in the global record, continuing a run of consecutive record-warm months that stretched back more than a year. Refrigeration systems that comfortably held a cave at target temperature in a normal summer have been working overtime, and some members have told us their humidity control has been the first thing to slip.
That order — temperature holds, humidity slips — is worth understanding, because it's not a coincidence. A refrigeration unit running near its capacity limit pulls moisture out of the air faster than it would under lighter load, even while it's successfully keeping the thermometer where you want it. If your temperature log looks fine but your wheels are drying out faster than usual, or a rind is cracking that never used to, an overworked compressor is a more likely explanation than anything wrong with your make.
The airflow half of the problem
Temperature and humidity get most of the attention, but airflow is the variable that quietly makes both of them harder to manage in a heat event. A cave that relies on passive air movement, or on a single fan doing double duty, tends to develop hot and dry pockets exactly where a heat wave pushes ambient conditions hardest — usually near an exterior wall or a door that gets opened during the worst part of the afternoon. Moving a wheel a few feet, or adding a second point of circulation, can matter more than any adjustment to the thermostat itself.
Members running smaller caves sometimes assume airflow problems are a large-facility issue, something that only shows up when you're managing hundreds of wheels across multiple rooms. In practice, a one-room cave can develop the same hot pocket near its door or its compressor exhaust that a much bigger facility develops near a loading dock. The scale is different; the physics are the same, and the fix is usually the same too — find where the air actually isn't moving, and put a fan or a baffle there instead of somewhere more convenient.
This is the exact ground our Humidity & Airflow Control course was built to cover, and members who've taken it have told us the biggest shift wasn't a new piece of equipment — it was learning to read a cave's microclimates well enough to catch a problem before it shows up as a compromised wheel. The course walks through how to map a room with a handful of inexpensive sensors rather than relying on a single reading near the thermostat, which is usually the gap between "my log looks fine" and "my product doesn't." If this summer has exposed a blind spot in how your space handles a sustained heat event, this is worth putting on your calendar before the next one arrives.
Before you assume it's your process
If you've had rinds or textures behave strangely since mid-July, check your equipment logs before you second-guess your recipe. A make that's worked reliably for years doesn't usually go wrong on its own; an environment running warmer and drier than it thinks it is will make even a solid process look inconsistent. Pull your compressor's run-time data if you have it, and compare it against the same week last year — a system running noticeably longer cycles is doing more work to hold the same setpoint, and that extra work is exactly what dries out a cave even when the thermostat says everything is fine.
Heat waves like this one aren't likely to become rarer, and a cave that's marginal in an average summer is going to keep being tested in the years ahead. Reach out to your regional rep if you want a second set of eyes on what your logs are telling you, and consider whether this is the year to build in a bit more airflow capacity before next summer arrives rather than after it does.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.