The wine cellar walls are in (I decided on green board instead of regular drywall). Everything is insulated, including the wine cellar door. If my wine cellar was 20 feet underground in a temperate climate, I could stop there. Unfortunately my wine cellar is in my heated basement, so a cooling unit is necessary to maintain the proper temperature.
There are two main types of wine cellar cooling units: venting to the outside, or venting to the inside. With an outside venting unit, duct work is required to move the heat from the wine cellar outside. This is a very complicated procedure, and requires professional installation, just as installing duct work for your furnace requires professional installation. If you have a 10,000 bottle wine cellar this may be necessary, but for me, that would be overkill.
My wine cellar will hold about 10,000 bottles, and my wine cellar dimensions are approximately 10 feet by 7 feet, so a massive cooling unit is not required. I simply installed a cooling unit that vents into the rest of the basement. My wine cellar is a small room at one corner of the basement, and it vents into a much larger room (approximately three times the size of the wine cellar). It is therefore relatively easy for any heat from the wine cellar to be easily dispersed throughout the rest of the basement.
I did a significant amount of research before deciding on the exact cooling unit required. There are only a limited number of suppliers, so talk to your local dealer for full details.
After extensive research, we selected the Breezaire WK2200. The Beezaire WK2200 is 14.25 inches wide by 13.25 inches tall by 16.38 inches deep. It has a maximum thermal capacity of 2,200 BTUs, and it can cool an area of up to 265 cubic feet. So, for my wine cellar that is approximately 10 feet long by 7 feet wide by 7 feet tall, the unit is perfect.
Breezeaire Wine Cellar Cooling Unit WK2200
When choosing a unit, don’t over do it. If you are following along and doing the math, you may think that a wine cellar 10 x 7 x 7 requires a cooler with a capacity of 490 cubic feet. In my case that would mean going from the Breezaire WK2200 up to the Breezaire WK3000, the next size up, which is rated at 650 cubic feet.
That wasn’t necessary. I’ve found that unless I’m in an out of the wine cellar frequently, the unit is only on for at most 5 minutes an hour, if that. The unit I have is more than sufficient to maintain a constant temperature.
Remember, once your wine cellar has cooled down to it’s ideal temperature, every bottle of wine stores the cool temperature, and helps maintain the temperature. When you first install the cooling unit it may take a few hours of constant operation to bring the temperature down to your set level, but after that, the unit will hardly every run.
What about Noise?
My wine cellar is in the basement, immediately adjacent to our television room. As long as the television room door is closed, I don’t hear the cooling unit. Even if I did hear it, it only runs for 5 minutes an hour, so it’s only a minor nuisance.
When you are upstairs, if you are perfectly quite, you can hear a faint noise from the basement, just as you could hear a de-humidifier running. However, under normal circumstances, you don’t hear it.
Obviously the unit is inside the wine cellar, so that absorbs some of the noise. The other key is to install the unit correctly, so that it is securely in place, which will minimize vibrations and other noise.
How do you install a wine cellar cooling unit? Read on.
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