Refrigerator Wine Coolers

Before I built my wine cellar, I had two wine coolers, or refrigerators. The motor to cool the units ran virtually none stop, just like happens with your kitchen refrigerator. Obviously they were using a lot of energy.

With my basement wine cellar cooling unit, the unit only runs for perhaps five minutes every hour, often less. Obviously one small unit running for five minutes per hour uses less energy than two refrigerators running none stop. Even better, my wine cellar can hold 1,200 bottles, as compared to under 300 for more two wine fridges. That’s an obvious energy saving.

Why the difference? I’m not an engineer, but I assume it’s due to the fact that, once the wine cellar reaches the optimal temperature, the 1,000 bottles store the coolness, which keeps the cellar cool. Also, the wine cellar has far better insulation than a wine refrigerator, which helps to maintain the temperature.

Other than great insulation, and keeping the door closed, I have two other energy saving tips.

First, keep your wine cellar full. The more wine you have, the more mass you have to retain the temperature. If you can’t fill your wine cellar with wine, store pop, beer, vegetables or anything else to help retain the heat.

Second, during the coldest days of winter, half fill plastic jugs with water, and leave them outside overnight to freeze. Then, bring them into your wine cellar during the day. They will absorb heat while they cool, which saves energy. In effect you are bringing the cold air from outside into your wine cellar. That’s free air conditioning, and that’s using winter to your advantage.

I’ve come up with a simple solution:  I take empty screw top wine bottles, and half fill them with water.  Then I put the bottles outside, in the cold.  On a very cold day, after a few hours, they freeze.

I then put the bottles, filled with ice, in my wine cellar.  As the bottles warm up to room temperature, the cold is transferred to the wine cellar, lowering the wine cellar temperature, at no cost to me.  Of course this only works on very cold days, but it’s free cold!

Here’s a caution: don’t fill the wine bottles up so they are full.  When the water freezes it expands, and it will burst.  I find that a half filled bottle is about right.

Also, don’t put the bottles in a slot next to your best wine.  I don’t want a block of ice immediately beside a bottle of wine.  I put my frozen bottles on a rack in an empty section of the wine cellar.

I also have a few bottles that I rotate.  Put three frozen bottles in the cellar, and three bottles full of water outside.  When the outside bottles freeze, and the bottles inside the cellar melt, switch them for free cooling on cold days.

Don’t worry about it. If it’s going to break, an extra month won’t make a difference. It is much more important to have the unit, and to have the exact dimensions, before the framing and installation process begins. I purchased the cooling unit and had it delivered before the framing started. I didn’t want to risk finishing the framing and then ordering the unit, only to discover that it was out of stock or discontinued. With the cooling unit in hand, it was easy to open the box, read the instructions, and create the perfect sized hole.Here’s the process:

Framing for Wine Cellar Cooling Unit

1 Start by framing the hole in the wine cellar wall adjacent to the rest of the basement. Obviously this is much easier to do if you frame the walls from scratch. If you are converting an existing room you will need to strip the walls down to the studs to allow for the proper framing. In my case the wall existed, so we removed the drywall from the inside of the wine cellar to expose the bare studs. Then, framing the hold for the cooling unit was a simple matter.

2 Install electrical outlet. Your cooling unit needs electricity, so you want to install your electrical outlet as close as possible to the cooling unit. So, before installing your drywall, have the electrician install an electrical outlet immediately adjacent to the cooling unit. You don’t want to be running extension cords in your wine cellar; it looks terrible, and isn’t safe. So, determine where the electrical cord from your cooling unit will go, and install the electrical outlet accordingly.

Cooling Unit Electrical

Note that in this picture it appears that the drainage hose is connected to the electrical outlet. It isn’t. Running water into an electrical outlet would be monumentally stupid. The drain hose enters the wall above the electrical outlet. The other end of the drain hose will connect to the cooling unit, but since the cooling unit has not yet been installed, it’s simply taped to the electrical outlet so that it’s out of the way for painting purposes. Obviously there is no electricity connected yet, so it’s not a problem.

3 Consider drainage. I was fortunate; the exterior wall of my wine cellar contained a drain pipe carrying waste water from the kitchen upstairs. So, it was a simple matter to install a drain hose in the wall, and feel it through the ceiling to the other wall and into the drain pipe.

Cooling Unit Drainage

4 Once the hole is framed, install your drywall (in my case, green board). Then, paint.

insert green board cooling unit picture here

5 Now, the easy part. Install the cooling unit. If the hole is the correct size, and the electrical outlet and drainage tube are in the correct location, this step is easy. Simply slide the unit into place, and jam some insulation around the edges so that it’s air tight. The unit is heavy, so two people are recommended for this process.

Basement Wine Cellar Cooling Unit

Note that the cooling unit is entirely inside the wine cellar. You could install it so that the unit is flush inside the wine cellar, but that would mean that the unit would be sticking out into the room outside the wine cellar. If it’s about 5 feet high, you would be constantly whacking your head on it as you walked by. (It would also look ugly). Since the unit is inside the wine cellar, the electrical connection is inside the wine cellar.

From outside the wine cellar all you see is the vent that you install on the wall over the cooling unit:

Cooling Unit - Outside View

The cover is shipped in basic white. You could easily paint it the color of your wall; I didn’t bother.

Wine Cellar Cooling Unit - With Racking

The cooling unit doesn’t look attractive before the racking is installed, but once the racking is installed it surrounds the cooling unit, so it remains visually appealing.

In my wine cellar the cooling unit and the door share the same wall, so I don’t have a lot of space for racking. In a slightly bigger wine cellar racking could be built all around the cooling unit to obscure it even more. I don’t think that’s necessary, so for me, I quite satisfied with the result.

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.