I’m planning to put a small cellar into my detached garage. It’s on Long Island so ambient temps are single digits in the winter to 90+ in the summer. The garage is a little more moderated but I’ve measured inside temps below 20F on the coldest days so even a well insulated room could be an issue
I’ve seen lots of posts & articles about units for cooling and humidity but does anyone have experience also fitting a heating option, whether in a single unit or as 2 separate? It seems like I might need to go outside of specialist wine cooling units.
Any advice on how to approach this would be very welcome. Given the location I have flexibility on through-wall, or split/ducted units
It’s an option, but it’s a large garage space that otherwise doesn’t have much need for climate control, especially as we’re not at the house full time
Can you frame and insulate a smaller sub-section of the garage? I live in NJ and an above ground “cellar” will need a lot of horsepower to cool in Summer. One good thing, plenty of humidity
I completed my cellar in August of last year, in northern NJ. Similar to your setup, it’s an above ground portion of an attached garage. The garage is well-insulated, and the wine cellar is insulated within that. I have a through wall unit that vents into the garage. The access into the cellar is from the adjacent family room, which is a conditioned space.
It maintained 55* in the heat of august last summer. Around halloween, the unit turned off, and it’s been maintaining temperature on it’s own, since then. However, the last few weeks, when it was extremely cold, way below freezing for a couple weeks, the cellar temp dropped to 50, while still safe, I’d like it be a bit warmer, I resolved this by leaving the door open for during the coldest days.
The concrete slab really helps maintain the temps.
Long story short, you may need some heating source for the really cold days, especially if you don’t have a heat room adjacent and you could open a door.
I mean, 50 is not an issue in any way whatsoever. As long as temps in the wine cellar itself don’t drop into freezing territory, I would be much more worried about using a heater and having it malfunction and cook wines than I would about wines freezing. My passive cellar gets into the high 30s every winter and I’ve never had an issue.
If you do add active heating to the equation, be careful of where the heat gets into the space. I would worry that anything in direct proximity to the heat would be at risk of getting cooked. Maybe placement of a thermal sensor in the area would inform your decision on whether and where to put wine near the heat source. One alternative to consider is installing a heated floor - I have no idea if the wattage would be enough to meet your heating needs, but it would be evenly distributed. I also don’t know if there are thermostat-driven heated floor units. The few that I’ve seen were binary switch-controlled.
To add to the other comments on how cold is too cold…my cellar gets down into the 40F range during the coldest part of the winter and that is of no concern to me at all.
Seems to me that you have a couple choices: 1- insulate and condition the garage for ex. With a mini-split; but 2026 winter saw very low humidity and humidifying an entire garage could be difficult? 2. Similar to above but construct a small wine room in the garage, smaller space to condition, 3. Purchase a modular prebuilt wine room with the required conditioning and find a spot for it in the garage. 4. Is there any spot in the house proper that can be used?
Inside the house isn’t going to work unless we also reconfigure the space. I think I’m leaning towards building a smaller, conditioned/insulated “room” inside the garage.
Just a little input - I’m assuming that you will build an insulated space which you will then cool with a specialist unit. This is what I did when I built my first cellar. It was in SW France but winter nights could be very cold indeed, so in addition to the cooling unit (which was absolutely essential in summer), I added a small, ordinary electric convector radiator. I set it on a very low setting, so it only worked when the weather got very cold (and of course most of the year it was just turned off). It worked really well and was a very cheap way of not worrying about low temperatures. I imagine that there are cooling units today which heat as well, but if they are a lot more expensive than the standard cooling ones, this could be a cheap alternative.
