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Cooling a "Wine Cellar"

My wife and I recently bought a new home. It's an older home, split level with two small rooms (14 x 14) underneath the upper level, with the only entrances being from the outside. The rooms have concrete floors and block walls with a solid concrete wall between them. Two walls are outside walls with one being about one half underground and both exposed portions have a brick veneer. I'd like to make one of the rooms into a wine cellar.

In my current home I have 300 bottles in racks under my house in a room that has an entrance from the garage. The garage serves as dead air space to the west and none of the other walls in this area are outside walls. This space stays relatively cool throughout the year: low 50s in the winter and never above the mid 60s in the summer. It's not perfect temperature but I don't pay for cooling and it's better storage than what I suspect a bottle would get in a retail shop. I'm afraid that my new cellar will be subject to a greater temperature range than what I currently have.

Here's my question: I need a relatively inexpensive solution to cooling this new area, using 110 volts and without having to knock out a portion of the wall to mount a cooling unit. Suggestions?

Thanks.

Reply to
JB
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Forget the electricity if you can't vent to the outside, as basic thermodynamics tells you that you can't cool anything without venting (can you go through the door perhaps?). What you're left with is insulating the cellars well enough to buffer them against temperature changes in the outside. Decreasing the air space in the cellar by adding stone, cement or other high thermal mass substances will also help decrease temperature swings. Neither of those strategies will help, though, if your mean temperature is simply too high (above 70F). Another strategy that a friend in Montreal uses is to run cold water pipes through his cellar space and using a continuous flow of cold water to cool the space. For more thoughts on this matter, see:

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HTH Mark Lipton

Reply to
Mark Lipton

"JB" in news:D9Rsc.9729$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net...

Here is a suggestion I've posted elsewhere and used myself, and a related comment.

I store and move around a certain amount of wine in various sites, cooled by various means. When I need extra storage, such as for temporarily staging quantity wine en-route elsewhere, I install a portable air conditioner that ducts its efflux through a flexible hose out a window, or even an intrior door, opened a couple of inches (a few cm) (through an adjustable fitting that blocks other air exchange at the window). This turns a small room into a capacious temporary wine refrigerator, without permanent changes. The Di Longhi "Pinguino" portables (widely available, including in the US) are an established brand, popular in Europe for retrofitting general air conditioning into places not designed for it. Some models include a water reservoir that exploits optional water fills (and any incidental condensation) both for a carrier vapor with increased heat capacity, and also I assume for its LVap (latent heat of vaporization, or evaporative cooling effect) to greatly increase the efficiency of the air conditioning. (Other competing brands are available, including from Japanese firms.)

General comment about vapor barriers. This may have been implicit in another query also posted here recently. People who install large custom insulated and cooled wine cellars in houses seem to focus first on a vapor barrier to exclude moisture. If a space is artificially cooled but exchanges moisture with the outside environment, it will tend constanly to pull in and condense water from outside. More of an issue in cellars than above-ground, I think.

Don't forget the words of experience (earlier here, and elsewhere): Whatever your idea of how much cooled wine storage you need, this mental goal will become revised after you have the storage. Always upward.

Reply to
Max Hauser

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