Maybe this is old news, but, Vintagekeeper is no more (or re-branded) and has been replaced by Koolr which is also http://www.wineracking.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
It looks like they have a new cabinet design. Some 3rd party sites say it will be released Nov 2010.
They also have new ACs and information saying you have to modify your old cabinet to accommodate the new system.
No phone information on their site but their return receipt to my online contact form has phone numbers. The recording names a company that is not Koolr or Wine Racking and the accent makes it tough to know what the word is. Also, the ringing sound is outside the US.
Update: Lucy is still at the other end of the phone. She has been at Vintagekeeper for years. She actually sounds a bit happier so yay. Cabinets 5 years and older will have to be modified for the new AC. She can do a lookup based on your SN on your current cooling unit to tell you if yours needs to be modified or not. $299 for the replacement, no tax and $35 shipping because they now have a new warehouse closer to me.
The old ACs sucked. I hope this one is better. Also sucks that I will only use it a few months until my wine cellar is completed.
Also, Lucy said the new cabinets are in production and should be released in the next few months.
I bought a nominal 200 bottle unit back in the mid-Nineties and the cabinet floor began sagging within months; the cooling unit, however, has performed like a champ all this time, but I only need to run it about six months out of the year.
Mike, no, it’s indoors, but in an unheated room (two outside walls); when I bought the unit, the room also didn’t have AC and I guess the high summertime humidity coming in the open windows led to the floor panel failing.
Au contraire. My fist cooling unit lasted 7 years and was only replaced because it got damaged in a move. My current one is 10 years old. I have been wanting to get a new one to be safe, but this new size bothers me since it will require a good aount of modification to resize the cutout.
Thanks for the information. I wonder if the upcoming cooling units are different from the existing Koolr units. My oldest cabinet is 11 years old and it accepts the current Koolr units without major modifications.
FWIW, I have three double door double deep Vintagekeeper wine cabinets on my basement. The temperature in the basement does not go above 68 degrees and I keep the temperature on the cooling unit between 50-52 F. The units are filled to capacity so the cooling units do not cycle that much because of the thermal mass.
The first wine cabinet I bought was back in April 1999 and the cooling unit on that one lasted for 61 months. I really liked that wine cabinet since it had solid doors instead of glass doors. It also stays cooler than the glass door wine cabinets. When I purchased that wine cabinet you paid extra for glass doors. Just after I purchased the first wine cabinet they discontinued the solid door wine cabinets and the the only way to buy them since then has been with glass doors.
The second wine cabinet I bought it in April 2004. It had glass doors and the cooling unit was slightly different than the first unit and it lasted seven months. The third wine cabinet was purchased in August 2005 and the cooling unit on that one lasted 13 months.
In 11 years and three Vintagekeeper wine cabinets, I have replaced the cooling units twice on each wine cabinet and the average life on cooling units has been 31 months. From the three different wine cooling units that I have seen, the worst ones were the ones named Tuscany (Circa 2004/2005) with an average lifespan of 21 months. The Vintage Keeper/Koolspace/Koolr/nuvo cooling units have been pretty good so far with an average lifespan of 32 months. The old unit was the longest lived with a 61 month lifespan.
That is pretty much what I have read elsewhere, that you can expect roughly 3 years out of the unit. Which means that even with a discount replacement program, you are still paying a bit over $100 a year for their units. I wonder if other brands last longer. If so, that would explain the huge price differences.
I guess I am lucky to have 10 years out of mine already. Of course, I am going to need to do a mod to reduce the size of the hole for the newer small unit. My existing one looks like the one on the left below.
Bruce, if I can get a new one for around $800 like I did my Tuscany 220, I will go that route. The new ones are allegedly quieter, hold 20% more and have 200% more insulation. Considering the poor R factor of the current units, I’m not sure how much an increase 200% actually is…but it has got to be better.
Looks exactly the same with the exception of the text to the left of the temp. Mine funny enough now says Vintage Keeper where it used to say Koolspace or something like that before.
I too only see the online contact method, no phone.
I emailed them a few weeks ago and they got back to me about the new units arriving in Canada by the end of June, but the US would be later. However, these were supposed to have been in last October.
My unit is currently running fine. I’m actually interested in what the new 500 bottle type units will look like. But they are not due in the US for several more weeks.
