disease-pests Humidity Issues? Chinense's not pollinating/producing pollen

[Super Hots Canada]

Hey folks,
 
I recently brought up this issue over on my glog, but I could use a bit more input from the masses.
 
Recently, I finally was able to build a grow space down in our basement, but the humidity only seems to reach around 42-50% humidity and I generally keep the temperature pretty consistent at around 77*F - 81*F (25-27* C).
 
My Cayenne's & Super Chile pollinate just fine (one of my Cayenne's loves to kick out loads of pollen), and even my one Jalapeno that has produced seems to be doing good. But as I discovered from reading other topics on here in the past few days, that isn't enough for Chinense's.
 
For the past few days I've kept a bucket of water with a moist towel in it (and held up by a board so the fan can hit it) and that's helped a tiny bit. And I've also misted, fairly heavily, my plants and the walls with hot water the past 2-3 nights, once a day (based loosely on advice from yezhead). That's helped the humidity waver around 50-52%.. and temporarily boosts it to around 60%.
 
So last night I invested in a humidifier:
 

 
.. and within a few hours (with it set on the "stay on" setting) it had emptied half the tank, but only seemed to help the humidity ever so slightly.
 
And then around 4am this morning our power went out and stayed off till around 7:30am. In that time, my plant room dropped from ~79*F to 61*F. *sigh*
 
At this point the temperature is stabilized again but the humidity is back down to just over 50% and seems to be -dropping- even with the humidifier going... Because of that, I re-arranged things a bit. I stacked a couple of boxes on the opposite side of the plant room & put the humidifier on top of it - so now it isn't in the "crossfire" of my two fans and it'll hopefully disperse over my plants.
 
According to what I read elsewhere, here on the forum, Chinense's need to have around 60-80% humidity.
 
Do I have to start misting my area down 3 times a day to keep the humidity up? What can I do to improve my situation?
 
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.. Also, here is an image of a couple of my Naga Jolokia flowers (best I could get).. Are they looking alright? Even if I catch them (and the Habanero's & my Reaper) when they're opening, they don't seem to have any noticeable pollen. And often the stigma's are barely noticeable or don't seem to be there at all (or are they just much shorter than on Annuum's?):
 

 
.. My Naga's & Reaper are are all working on pushing out a lot more flowers, and as you can see from the image below my Habanero's have no trouble producing flowers:
 

 
 
.... So... thoughts?
 
Thanks folks!
 
 

 

[Brain Strain Pepper Head]

My basement maintains 45% humidity inside and I live in a dry climate with maybe 20% in the spring and summer outside grow and mine do fine. I don't think that that's your problem.

 

[Super Hots Canada]

My basement maintains 45% humidity inside and I live in a dry climate with maybe 20% in the spring and summer outside grow and mine do fine. I don't think that that's your problem.

 
Okay.
 
Any thoughts what the issue might be? or help with narrowing down the issue?
 
I'll gladly answer any questions as best as I can. *nod*

 

[Roguejim]

"According to what I read elsewhere, here on the forum, Chinense's need to have around 60-80% humidity."
 
I wonder about this only because there are many places with nowhere near this level of humidity, and chinenses still pollinate, and pod up well.  Having said that, however, last season here in hot and dry southern Oregon, some of my chinenses didn't pollinate much at all, but others did.  So, I'm stumped...

 

[Super Hots Canada]

"According to what I read elsewhere, here on the forum, Chinense's need to have around 60-80% humidity."
 
I wonder about this only because there are many places with nowhere near this level of humidity, and chinenses still pollinate, and pod up well.  Having said that, however, last season here in hot and dry southern Oregon, some of my chinenses didn't pollinate much at all, but others did.  So, I'm stumped...

 
Yeah, I kinda wondered about that, as well. I know the climate definitely varies from Nevada, to California to Louisiana, etc.. No way that most of those southern places are likely to be -that- bloody humid.
 
I was thinking of aiming for that "on the safe side" since this is my first year, and well, quite frankly, I wanted to see if that would rule out the issue of them not producing.
 
Maybe it's still just too soon? My Reaper -just- started opening it's flowers in the past couple of weeks and my Habanero's & Naga's just started blooming in the past two months.
 
Occasionally, a lower leaf will fall from a plant here & there (after turning yellow), but I -think- that may sometimes be from over-watering.
 
And my plants are on the concrete floor. I'm noticing with the Naga's that the ones that -aren't- are producing more flowers. Cold feet, maybe?

 

[Roguejim]

Here's some info I found.  You can decide its accuracy.
 
"lack of flower-set....
Immaturity, too hot or too cold during the day, too hot or too cold during the night, not enough nutrients, too much nutrients, too humid, too dry, not enough air circulation, lack of pollinators, too much grower attention ;-)
~ courtesy of Willard (from the Hot Pepper Forum).
In other words, relax and give them time. My superhots drop hundreds of flowers before they get going."
 
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/pepper/msg0314053124860.html?12
 
One other bit of info I found was that excess nitrogen can cause excess foliar growth at the expense of pollen production.

 

[cruzzfish]

Temps seem a little bit high. Try to lower them to 73-77. Humidity should be fine, I get a huge amount of peppers starting in march and pickable in june, so whatever humidity percent is around that time of year.

 

[Super Hots Canada]

I -hope- that in terms of nutrients that I'm doing alright. The Cayenne & Super Chile sure seem to think so lol
 
At night I leave the T8's on (3 of them in the space - 2 on one end, and 1 on the other) and the temperature drops to around 68-72*F. And I have 2 oscillating fans positioned in the room to make sure that pretty much all the plants get hit with at least a light breeze constantly (those are on 24/7).
 
I guess the best I can do for now is attempt to be patient (which I suck at lol) and hope that Willard's advice pays off. *crosses fingers*
 
I haven't really used an Epsom Salt spray on them in a long time. Might it help to start doing that, say, every couple weeks?

Temps seem a little bit high. Try to lower them to 73-77. Humidity should be fine, I get a huge amount of peppers starting in march and pickable in june, so whatever humidity percent is around that time of year.

 
I can give that a shot. It would up the humidity and likely stop them from drying out/sucking up so much water.

 

[cruzzfish]

Give them a fan if it gets too high. I found that higher temps lead to higher humidity because more water is in the air.

 

[filmost]

Here's some info I found.  You can decide its accuracy.
 
"lack of flower-set....
Immaturity, too hot or too cold during the day, too hot or too cold during the night, not enough nutrients, too much nutrients, too humid, too dry, not enough air circulation, lack of pollinators, too much grower attention ;-)
~ courtesy of Willard (from the Hot Pepper [SIZE=100%]Forum[/SIZE]).
In other words, relax and give them time. My superhots drop hundreds of flowers before they get going."
 
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/pepper/msg0314053124860.html?12
 
One other bit of info I found was that excess nitrogen can cause excess foliar growth at the expense of pollen production.

 
For what it's worth, my plants that I grew last year (jalapeno and a cayenne type) didn't set fruit until mid-september, even though they put out flowers left and right throughout summer. I live in Japan and in my area (Kanto/Tokyo) temps were stable around 95F but sometimes higher and humidity sometimes as high as 100%.
 
In mid-september, the temps dropped drastically as did the humidity and that is when my flowers set pods.  So per the above comment from gardenweb (I actually read that way back as well), I would say don't worry too much. They will set when the time comes for them to set.