Vapor Barrier Question

Hey everyone,

I’m turning a closet at home into a cellar. The space is 4 1/2 ft by 6 1/2 ft, and I’ve purchased a BreezAire unit for cooling it.
So I’ve gutted the room, framed out the hole in the wall for the BreezAire, ran a dedicated electrical circut, and now am wondering what order to put the insulation and vapor barrier up. I’ve read to put the vapor barrier over the insulation as well as under… Does it matter?
I started off with a simple 36 bottle refridgeration unit, who knew it would fill up so fast!?!

Thanks again

It is important, but it depends on your enviornment. Where do you live? If your enviornment is humid, the barrier should be on the outside to keep the moisture out; if dry on the inside to keep the moisture in.

I live in Fort Worth, so it’s safe to say dry to extremely dry!
Thanks for the info, I needed someone to confirm my idea about the situation.

Consider using closed cell foam insulation sprayed into the stud bays. It’s expensive and usually you have to use twice the amount the instructions suggest. I found the kits online on eBay. They come in canisters of various sizes. It must be closed cell though as it gives you the vapor barrier. Then, you won’t need the vapor barrier. I’ve been really happy with my cellar. But to answer your question, the vapor barrier goes outside, so you may need to line the stud bays before insulation and finish.

I suspect this is too late, but:

1. Never have two vapor barriers (inside and outside) as moisture can get trapped between the two.
2. For wine cellars, one almost always wants the vapor barrier on the warm side (i.e., the outside in almost all scenarios). The biggest concern is having humidity condense against the colder air of the cellar and then causing mold/rot in the wall. True, if it is dry outside and humid inside, then moisture is likely to move towards the outside, but it shouldn’t condense in the walls, which is the real concern.

On #2, In home building there is debate on which side to put vapor barrier, because most houses in the U.S. are cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, meaning the “cold side” flips between seasons. So, what happens is typically in the south the vapor barrier is put on the outside because most of the time one is using cooling and in the north the vapor barrier may be put on the inside, because winter cold is more likely to cause condensation. But for wine cellars it’s easier because for most cellars people are always cooling it relative to the house (yes, garages and some unconditioned cellars may be an exception).

read Richard Gold’s How and Why to Build a Wine Cellar.
alan

Any suggestions on where to find a reasonable priced cellar door? Surfing the net, the prices are much higher than I expected. Any suggestions on cellar doors?

How good do you want it to look? There are plenty of exterior doors at Home Depot that will do for under $250. Or you can order a nice, wood exterior door made by one of many companies, but the prices for those will probably be comparable to the online wine cellar doors.

Thanks, Andrew. Found a nice Taylor door at a local building supply firm. More than HD but considerably less than any of the ones we looked at on line plus no shipping. Most important- my wife loves the “prairie” style!

Glad you found something to your liking. Kind of forgot for a moment there’s a wide range of stuff between low-end Home Depot and high-end custom/bespoke wood doors that can look pretty good and don’t break the bank.

(Personally I find the wine cellar doors to be rather overwrought in many instances - it’s not a dungeon nor a medieval castle. Of course, I went with the non-showpiece approach, so my preferences may differ from others’