I have collected wine and maintained a cellar for many years, and one concern has always bothered me: problems often begin quietly.
A cooling-system failure, excessive humidity, unexpected activity in the cellar (think kids or babysitter may go unnoticed until someone happens to check.
That led me to develop WineSentry, an upscale cellar-monitoring system that sends notifications directly to your phone for:
Temperature changes
Humidity changes
Motion in the cellar
Lighting changes
The system is housed in an artisan-made wood enclosure because I wanted something that would look appropriate in a serious private cellar—not like a piece of industrial equipment.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am the founder of the company, and I recently joined Wine Berserkers as a BerserkerBusiness member. I am posting here because I would genuinely value feedback from people who actually maintain wine cellars and significant collections.
Which risks concern you most?
Would you care primarily about temperature and humidity, or would motion, lighting, loss of communication (WiFi), and other conditions also matter? Is there something important that I have overlooked?
More information and photographs are available at:
I would appreciate candid reactions—positive or negative. WineSentry grew from my own experience as a collector, and feedback from this community would be particularly valuable.
Very cool, although price would be an important component to understand.
Thoughts: I use sensor push as the gateway to data on my phone. Relatively inexpensive and works great. It is a 1-2” square (battery) that sits in the cellar with a gateway unit placed outside cellar as the transmission engine (plugged in). Long battery life great tracker for humidity and temp.
I changed out the lock for a biometric or code to unlock cellar door so movement is a non-issue.
Upgrades: would like it to sound an alarm (on phone) when temp was out of range but it only provides updates when you click into the app (at least for me anyway). There is a threshold alarm but it doesn’t do a good job of indicating.
Would love a light indicator because someone leaves lights on accidentally… if I only knew who that was…
Since the cooling system displays all the data there is no need to spend the money for unit on look & feel rather a powerful battery powered unit that sends data to a phone is where the money might be better spent.
Does the device rely on a proprietary web service? I understand there is no subscription or service fees, nonetheless my concern with some other existing products is that if the backend web service shuts down, the products become essentially useless.
Personally, the decorative value is lost on me, but better for those with pretty cellars to comment on. I use wireless sensor tags, which does concern me if the service ever shuts off.
That is an excellent question, and your concern is entirely reasonable.
WineSentry does currently use LuxSense’s cloud service to deliver phone notifications and maintain remote communication with the sensor. Of course all phone notifications have to go through Google and Apple. That’s how they get to their destination. The sensor and its local display are not dependent on the cloud simply to measure temperature and humidity, but the remote alerts and app-based functions do rely on our service.
There are additional services required for deployment of our intended market. Simply determining what timezone someone is in and whether they observe DST requires a 3rd party service.
However, we are not alone – I own a large software company (nearly 100 employees) and as you might imagine a significant number of people dedicated to security and infrastructure. They will help make sure the needed back-end services are running. For one thing – I depend on it as do people I personally know and understand a commitment we must make to our clients.
And your reaction to the decorative enclosure is useful feedback as well. It is intentionally aimed at collectors with finished cellars who do not want a plastic utility device on display, but I completely understand that function will matter more than appearance to many owners.
Thank you for raising the issue. It is exactly the kind of candid feedback I was hoping to receive here.
You have identified exactly where I believe WineSentry needs to distinguish itself: dependable active notifications rather than requiring the owner to remember to open an app to find out what is happening.
I also understand your point about the enclosure. For some collectors, appearance and a local display are important; for others, a smaller and more utilitarian sensor would be preferable. That is useful feedback as we consider future configurations.
Pricing will certainly be important, and I will share that clearly before asking anyone here to seriously evaluate the product.
And yes—the “someone left the cellar lights on” problem will definitely be added. Today we notify when the lighting changes – we might as well notify that the lighting is ON after XXX minutes. Great idea.
I can’t imagine the motion thing being an issue at all. Why would your cellar be moving around in any way? If there’s an earthquake, maybe?
As far as the light, yes, I suppose if it was turned on or left on inadvertently, might be nice to get notification.
I am fairly sure at least on iPhone I get a notification. For iPhone check Settings > Apps > SensorPush > Notifications, or Settings > Notifications > SensorPush.
I’ve used several of this sort of device over the years and have settled on this system, and my daughter uses one in her cello case for the same reason. (Also really good in that application because it’s so small and light that it will not hurt the instrument if it comes loose.)
The battery lasts a long time but it’s a special size (CR2477) that I order from Digikey rather than Amazon so I get not-fake Panasonic batteries.
I think this is a very valid concern, but if you want notifications to a mobile phone I don’t see any way around it. This system runs about $200 total so if I need to replace after some number of years like I did Netatmo, no big deal. Alternately, you can add sensors for this to a general home alarm system with a well-established alarm monitoring company, but that is far more expensive.
all good, plenty of posts already so all those in here will move to the new subforum, and Commerce Corner is probably the 2nd most popular subforum always anyway!
I crossed the alert threshold I changed earlier (killed the app then so it wasn’t running) then got a notification one minute after crossing at 2:17pm. Glad we talked about this, there is a setting for banner style that was defaulted to ‘temporary’, so I set this to ‘persistent’ so I have to dismiss it in case I don’t see it initially. If you’re not seeing anything I’d look at the settings again. I’ve also found that LLMs are pretty good at diagnosing iPhone issues like this too.
Just like cars, houses, watches, and wine itself, there are many different price points—even when the products appear to perform the same basic function. We wanted to create something distinctive: a monitoring system that feels at home in an exceptional cellar. I have been fortunate enough to visit quite a few of them.
We began with solid blocks of exotic woods, many species I had never encountered before this project. We then incorporated materials such as solid brass, carbon fiber, and brushed aluminum. Each enclosure is CNC-machined here in our facility.
At the same time, we developed the software and monitoring features that we believe make WineSentry different:
Active phone notifications for temperature and humidity deviations
LumenGuard alerts for unexpected lighting changes—and, as of today, lights left on too long
Motion detection within the cellar, added after my wife selected a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet for cooking
A remote local display, so current conditions are visible without opening an app
Historical charting and monitoring
Home-screen widgets for both iOS and Android
Support for multiple cellars; my business partner has three cellars in three different time zones
Over-the-air software updates, because we intend to keep improving the system
Lithium battery backup during power interruptions
Cellular LTE backup planned for extended Wi-Fi outages
Direct support from the company that designed the hardware, software, and service
WineSentry certainly will not be for everyone. Neither is DRC.
But for the collector who wants serious monitoring, active notification, local visibility, and something beautiful enough to belong in their cellar, it may be exactly right.
With continued input from this community, I believe WineSentry can become something that stands apart from the other options. We also hope to give something back to those who help us improve it.
may go unnoticed until someone happens to check.