I stumbled across a few articles about storing primers and how humidity affects them over long durations (aka: "years"). I live in Central Oregon, basically High Desert, and I store my primers on the shelf in my reloading room in my house, which is temp and humidity controlled to about 70° and 35% respectively. Historically I figured that was fine, but what I've read lately, and the amount of money I have invested in my 12,000-ish primers, made me re-think that practice.
So I bought a sealed (waterproof) plastic tub for storage, and a batch of little desiccant packages ... and loaded the tub with my primers and threw in a couple of desiccant packs. Within a few days, my desiccant had turned from "orange" to "dark green" indicating they were saturated. I pulled them out, and threw in two more packs and a few days later, same result.
I'll keep doing this until I get desiccant that doesn't saturate, and then ratchet back to a schedule that works to keep my primer stock nice and dry.
Lesson-Learned: Storing primers in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled environment "on a shelf" ... isn't good enough to keep them dry and reliable for years. I needed a sealed container and desiccant packs to guarantee a "bang" instead of a "click" 5-10 years down the road.
Hope this helps someone else that, like me, thought "on a shelf" was the right place for long-term primer storage.
