reading about A/C failure and wine spoilage got me thinking. Many of us have wine at home in various situations—room temp, temp controlled wine units, temp controlled or passive cellars. How do you protect against it being ruined?
Options include backup or redundant cooling units—that’s what I had at my last house—a generator if electricity goes out, lots of insulation in wine cellar, solar batteries, moving the wine, likely many others. Backup cooling won’t help if power is out long term.
I’ve got R-35 insulation in my cellar, a split system cooling unit checked yearly, SensorPush monitoring, and solar power with backup batteries that will include the cellar on the supplied circuit.
Doesn’t help with earthquakes, though.
Oh, and a trained pair of King cobras to guard against theft, though they are a bit sluggish due to the cool cellar temperature.
The simple solution is to go buy a replacement window unit and let the thermal mass of the wine and insulation/aspect of the room carry me through the replacement time.
I did have a failure once when I was out of town. The answer then was to have a willing co-worker come downstack wine out of the room sufficient to get access to the central AC ducts that I sealed off, unseal them, and crank the house AC in that zone down until I returned. My power bill that month was only 40% over typical and the wine stayed in the low 60s through the outage.
For power outages, I do have a portable generator that can run the cellar AC and refrigerator/freezers on a rotating basis. I have not had to rely upon that for an extended outage yet, but we are due for a big hurricane one of these years so I keep the generator maintained and a supply of fuel on hand when storms approach.
Earthquakes aren’t likely here. That would be a huge problem with my racking and precarious box stacking.
One reason why I keep most of my wine (more valuable, longer agers in particular) in a professional facility. I would love to have a basement situation, where the worst case scenario might be some days or weeks at relatively cool ambient temps, but that’s not possible around here.
I should also note that I have used the pandemic to build a community of neighbors who know how to check on the cellar when we are out of town and are more than willing to help out if another outage while away occurs. It was well worth the shared wine.
I agree, if (1) the units are in the house (not the garage), (2) the house is not unusually hot inside, and (3) you aren’t away for a very long time, then I think you can just come home and get it fixed.
If you’re gone for the whole summer and your house is going to be 85 degrees, then some monitoring and fallback / emergency plan is in order so your wines don’t get ruined by a system failure in the earlier part of the summer.
But I think for most people in most situations, you can just react and get it fixed without any harm coming to your wines.
The benefits of a passive cellar! It generally has a range of 55-65 degrees throughout the year. However, two years ago, we had a freak occurrence where it got to 110+ outside for several days and the cellar creeped up to the low 70s. That was my cooling method failure. After that, I bought a portable A/C unit that runs occasionally to keep the cellar below 63 at all times. With the amount it is used, it will outlive me.
I live in coastal California and my house doesn’t have AC. I store most of my wine in a wine fridge but the temperature in our house never really exceeds 80 F at the hottest part of our rare 100 degree days and even then it’s in the 50s every night, so simply having all the wine in a big fridge would be sufficient to keep temps in the 60s to low 70s even in a long term outage or power shut off in the summer. So I don’t worry about it, which I do recognize is a luxury. Even more blessed, my uncle lives in western San Francisco and all his wine ages perfectly for decades just sitting in their garage.
I am in FL. My cooling unit did fail, once. I have a wine “room” in the garage. I rolled in a free-standing AC and ran the exhaust out through the space normally occupied by the built-in unit. Worked great. I have a small Honda generator in case of a power failure, my biggest nightmare. It would not backup the house, but the wine should be ok. If I am away in the summer and there is a power failure, I have problems likely only solvable by an automatic whole house generator.
On my to do list is installing a home generator to help with this. The issue is that the house is larger than a home generator can fully handle, meaning I would have to choose what I cool/power. My guess is that my decision wouldn’t be the wine cellar. It’s insured, wine is replaceable, and I have other priorities in the event of that type of situation.
A 30 kw generator isn’t enough? We have a 30kw generator and have 3 AC units, 5 freezer/refrigerators etc and the generator has no problems, we can wash
Dishes and use the electric washer and dryer.
Not necessarily. We have 400 amp service and a 22kW generator hooked into both 200 amp circuits. It won’t run everything theoretically possible, but will run everything that is most commonly running. It will not run all 3 AC units at the same time, but you can tie those circuits into the shedding function that will keep it balanced. You can buy a huge water cooled unit if you just really want overkill.
Yeah, I think it also depends how hot it is there and how cold you keep it. We have more sq/ft than that and haven’t had a problem keeping the house cool with the 3 4 ton AC which we’ve run on generator power before, quite often actually because we lose power a lot here. I think Kelly Walker said he had a 45 kw generator, so you could get a larger generator if you wanted, although the cost of getting larger than 30kw is exponentially higher.
Two rooms for the home cellar here with a door that communicates between them. A door that opens to the house which could be opened to get A/C from the house into the cellar if needed… Two separate A/C units - one for each room — gets checked twice a year and I have a contract with a friends HVAC company that services them so parts are readily available and don’t need to be ordered for later delivery. Back up natural gas generator is hooked up to cover that 1/2 of the house because the house was luckily built with the subpanel right next to the gas meter on that side of the house. The generator gets serviced yearly and exercises weekly on Monday to stay ready. I tell you - the back up generator was the easiest thing to ever spend $ on - provides a nice piece of mind!
P.S. Forgot - the rooms are FULL so I tell myself to keep them full so that the sheer volume and thermal mass in there serves to protect it all :). LOL - at least that’s what I tell myself.
We have our cool rooms alarmed so that if they go over a pre ordained temp for 30 minutes, our monitoring company receives an alarm.
Insurance to cover failed refrigeration is cost prohibitive here.
Worst case scenario, if refrig is totally incapacitated, rent a cool room. If no power then use a gen set.
