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.

At the end of the year I harvested my potato crop, and I want to store them into the winter. What better place than a wine cellar?

Potatoes Stored in Wine Crate

Since this was my first year growing potatoes, I didn’t have a huge crop for storage, so I took the easy approach and took an old wine crate, and filled it with large potatoes. Next year when I have more potatoes I’ll get bigger containers, and store the potatoes in a crate filled with sand, or saw dust, or some other medium to retain moisture while keeping the potatoes separated.

I found that potatoes stored this way will easily keep for three months or more (after three months we had consumed them, so I don’t know how much longer they would have lasted). The same approach worked for carrots and kohlrabi as well.

So, when planning your wine cellar, be sure to select some wine cellar racks that will allow you to store vegetables for the winter. But here’s a tip: don’t store apples and potatoes in the same room; the apples give off a gas that makes potatoes germinate, so unless you want them to germinate, store them in separate rooms.

If you are an expert carpenter, you can build them yourself. You would need to build a jig, or template, for the racking, and then assemble and build them yourself. If you plan to build many more wine cellars in the future, this is a good option. If you don’t plan to ever build a wine cellar again, this approach is a lot of work for not much gain.

You could also hire a professional to do the entire job for you. They will custom-build your racks exactly to your specifications, and they will install them perfectly. Of course you will pay a huge premium for the design and building of custom wine racks.

I went with the middle option: I bought a kit. With a kit the wine racks are partially assembled, so the installation time is greatly reduced. A kit still gives you the flexibility to design what you want. I believe it’s the most cost effective option: I get virtually custom made racks, at a fraction of the price of custom made.

To start, do your wine cellar planning, and determine how many bottles you plan to store. I decided that storage for around 1,200 bottles was perfect, based on the space I have available, and my expected consumption over the next few years. (If you consume two bottles a week, that’s 100 bottles per year; adding in parties and special occasions and gifts, that may double to 200 bottles per year, so 1,200 bottles is a six year supply. Of course some bottles are consumed young, and others are stored, so you will have to determine how much wine you have for laying down, and how much is for quicker consumption, which will impact on the size of your wine cellar, and the type of racking).

Types of wine cellar racking

Wine Cellar Standard Racking

The most obvious type of racking are racks that hold single, standard sized bottle. As you can see from the picture, the racks are based on long vertical support posts, with small pieces of wood inserted to hold the bottles.

If you have carpentry skills this type of rack is not that difficult to construct, but again, why bother when you can buy a kit. If you normally drink standard sized bottles, this racking is ideal. If you normally consume odd shaped bottles, either smaller or larger than normal, this racking may not be idea.

I’ve found that even smaller or larger bottles will generally fit in this type of racking.

Square Wine Cellar Racking

You can also buy racking that is simply a square, so that you can store large sized bottles, or even wine in boxes or shipping crates. In this picture the cross pieces, in the shape of an X, are removable. They are not fastened in, so you can simply pull them out to store full boxes or crates. Or, leave them in place, and you have four separate compartments per square to store your bottles.

My advice is to combine both types of racking for future growth, and for your changing needs. Perhaps you don’t drink champagne, so you don’t need a place to store magnum sized bottles. But what happens if in the future your tastes change? Having racking that will accommodate many different bottle sizes is the best option.

Wine Cellar Racking - Full View

In my cellar I combined both individual racks and a squares for boxes. As you can see in the picture, it’s nice to have a place to put boxes.

Some of your guests may enjoy beer, so being able to keep a case or two of beer cool in your wine cellar is a great option. Of course my kids also store their pop in the wine cellar, so again, some empty squares are useful for that as well.

Where to Buy Racking

Where to buy will depend on where you live. I purchased my racking, and my cooling unit, from Rosehill Wine Cellars in Toronto.

Racking in Boxes

They will ship anywhere in North America, although the farther away you live, the more it will cost. We actually made the trip to Toronto to see the cooling units and racking in person before ordering. I assume there are many other distributors around North America that can serve your needs.

The racking ships in big boxes, and the delivery man will probably be too lazy to carry the boxes downstairs for you (ours was, even though we offered him cash to do it), so be prepared to carry them downstairs yourself. I did it on my own; they are heavy, but not impossible for one person to lift.

Assembling Wine Cellar Racking

The final job is assembly. If you want to do the job in a few hours, you will need a nail gun. You could do it with a drill and a screwdriver, but since you will need to drill 1,000 holes, that approach will take you a week. If you don’t have a nail gun and an air compressor, buy one, or rent one. It will be money well spent.

Or, do what I did. Call up your brother in law, who happens to be a carpenter with his own tools, and offer him lunch and a few dollars cash, and you are away to the races. It worked for me.

It will take a while to assemble the first rack, but once you see how they go together all of the rest of them will go quite easily.

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.

You have two choices when it comes to your wine cellar door.

First, you could decide that you want your door to be a show-piece, much like the front door of your house. Your guests walk down to your basement, and from across the hall they see a beautiful door. Perhaps made of tempered glass, or perhaps a wooden door, inlaid with carvings of grapes, wines, or other scenes. People gasp at it’s beauty.

Your other choice is to do the exact opposite: make the door as un-glamorous and as un-assuming as possible. Do I want to advertise my wine cellar? If someone breaks into my house, do I want them to be drawn to a beautiful door, knowing what’s behind it?

Furthermore, is a beautiful glass door the most energy-efficient door? Will it keep the temperature constant? I think not.

Wine Cellar Door

As you can see from this wine cellar door picture, I choose to go for practical, and simple. This door is an exterior insulated door, the exact same door you might use as your back door, or even your front door, at your house. It’s insulated to keep the temperature constant, it’s very strong, in the event that someone wanted to break in, and it’s plain white and un-assuming.

A glass door makes no sense. Wine needs total darkness; this door accomplishes that objective. I don’t want the door to be the show-piece in my wine cellar. Go practical: go for a simple exterior insulated door.

Oh yes, it has the added advantage of being much less expensive than a ridiculously ornate show-piece door.

First, the floor supports the weight of your entire wine cellar collection, so it must be very strong. That’s an obvious reason why wine cellars are built in the basement; you have no worries about the floor collapsing under the weight of 1,000 bottles of wine.

Second, the ground cools in the winter and warms in the summer, so both cold and heat can be transmitted through the floor into the wine cellar if it isn’t properly insulated. You can read my post on wine cellar floor insulation to see how I insulated the floor.

Finally, you will actually see the floor, so it’s important to make it aesthetically pleasing. I have previously commented that it doesn’t really matter what the walls look like, since they will be covered with wine racks. Obviously the floor won’t be covered with anything, so it’s important that it is visually appealing.

We started by framing the floor and insulating it.

Then the floor studs are covered in 3/4 inch plywood for strength.

Then a wire mesh base is installed over the plywood, and the a “cement” base is installed over the mesh.

Then, the floor tile is installed.

As you can see from the picture we chose a dark slate type tile. It does have some texture, but it is flat enough that the wine racks won’t wobble when installed.

In my next post I’ll show you the finished product.

One school of thought is that this is an opportunity to add a distinctive flair to the wine cellar by using textured finishes and other fancy wall treatments. I am of the view that that’s silly.

I opted for the simplest solution of all: latex paint. I always use good quality paint, since I have no desire to ever need to repaint the walls again, but even if you buy the top of the line paint, to paint a wine cellar will cost less than $100, so get good paint and don’t worry about it.

As you can see by the picture, it’s painted walls in a neutral shade. I guarantee that this is the most boring picture on this web site, and that’s my point. It’s a painted wall. Nothing fancy, just a wall. Don’t over think it.

The main reason for not getting fancy on the walls is that no-one will ever see the walls. They will be covered with the wine racks, so don’t get fancy. Paint it, and forget it.

One final comment: even latex paint smells, and it needs time to dry. Since a wine cellar is a closed room, there is no place for the smell to go. So, once you have finished painting, use a fan to circulate the air, and keep the door open for a few days to dissipate the smell. Don’t plan on painting one day and installing your racks the next day.

There is considerable debate over the materials to use for the walls. There are three obvious options:

First, use normal drywall. It’s inexpensive and readily available. However, it’s not a great material when their is moisture in a humid wine cellar. Of course the drywall is painted, and if the wine cellar is properly insulated and cooled there should not be water dripping down the walls, so normal drywall should be sufficient.

The second option is to use “green board”, which is the material used is damp environments, such as a bathroom or kitchen. It is resistant to moisture. More specifically, green board doesn’t encourage the growth of mold and mildew as you may find in standard drywall. On the down side, it’s more expensive than standard drywall.

The third option is to use a fiberglass based board, which is now used for areas like showers where you expect water to hit the walls. This is the most expensive option.

After much consideration, we decided to go with option #2, green board. It’s not that much more expensive than drywall, and it does offer some additional protection against mold and mildew. We decided that option #3 was overkill. In a properly insulated and cooled wine cellar there will not be excess humidity and moisture, so this should be the most cost effective solution.

The interesting part, however, was that our contractor forgot the discussion about green board, and as you can see from the picture, he installed normal drywall. I didn’t notice this until the next morning, when I asked him about it.

He thought about it briefly, and told me that he didn’t think there would be a problem with the normal drywall. I agreed, but I said that I would prefer the green board option.

So, with no further discussion, he had his guys rip out the drywall and install the green board.

Fortunately his guys are quick and efficient, so replacing the old with the new was a two hour task. I guess it helps if you know what you are doing (and fortunately only one round of tapping and mudding had been completed).

So, after some hiccups, I am now the proud owner of a green boarded basement wine cellar.