Seasonal Cellar Temperature Fluctuations

WINE TALK
41

Thanks for all the people pitching in about wine aging. I haven’t personally studied this extensively, but thankfully the internet provides us with someone who has. The temperature issue I quoted is an average, so there may be significant differences between reds, whites, champagne, closure, etc.

Just to go back to the heat dissipation issue… does your door have a significant amount of glass? If so, is it made to prevent heat transfer (e.g double paned)? Glass conducts heat pretty well (which is why it feels cool to the touch), so there may be a constant loss of cooling there. Also, if there’s noticeable heat transfer from the door, you can put a strip of foam or rubber with adhesive to the doorway to create a better seal. These seem like easier fixes that won’t run up the cost too much for what you already put into it.

42

It sounds like your contractor did not do a great job and is making silly excuses. Of course you can build a room-sized refrigerator in a house. My cellar is in my basement and has 1 outside wall that is about 5 feet underground and 3 feet above ground (facing west). It has been near 100 degrees here in the DC area for the last few days. My cellar was 56 degrees in the dead of winter. It is 56 degrees now. You either have an insulation problem or a cooling unit problem. What did they do for insulation? I have 3.5" of closed cell foam in the walls and about 5" in the ceiling and it works great.

Is the door an exterior door? Designed for a cellar? My door is an exterior french door that has a large piece of glass. It has an airtight seal.

I agree with everyone who says your temps are not a problem, but it would bother me that the contractor is making excuses. I assume he charged a lot of money to build your cellar. He should have done a load calculation to determine the cooling capacity you need. Just looking at cubic feet isn’t enough. If your cooling unit runs 24/7 it is not going to last as long as it should.

43

We have a 2000 bottle cellar and the recent 105-110 weather made the compressor shut down more than usual. The intake vent is outside and was sucking in that super hot air.

44

More often than not it is an installation related issue. What is the R-Value of the walls/ceiling? How long is the ducting on the unit? What is the supply/return temps in the cellar (please use a dial/digital thermometer, not the IR). What is the supply and return temps on the compressor side? does the glass door have double pane glass and weatherstripping?

Continuos operation if not cooling properly will kill the unit, as the compressor relies on cold suction gas for cooling.

Please post some pics of the install.

FWIW, WG has the best customer support in the industry, contact Russell there he can walk you through some testing to determine the unit is operating properly.

45

Chuck Miller is just killing it. Great work, Chuck!

Chris asked the question I most suspect - is there a way to check your ceiling in that space?

I have had two friends who were done in by forgetting to insulate the ceiling of their wine cellars.

Thanks for keeping us posted, this is a fascinating problem. I share your anxiousness.

46

Chris we have an active cellar. The contractor who built it (and by the way he built for some of the board favorite winemakers) came over to check it out.

Our issue is superheated intake air. Measured at 110 plus at the unit last week.

47

Most units have the BTU capacity rated at 90°F, the capacity will be reduced significantly above that temperature and should be accounted for in high temperature areas.

48

Thanks again for all of the responses and insights. Here are some updates:

• The mass consensus is that my problem is likely related to poor insulation, and I think that this is highly probable. I was not present for much of the construction, as I sometimes travel for work. So, I do not know what material was used for insulation because I was not around for this part of the construction, but I am fairly certain that he used fiberglass batts. That appears to be used in one of the pictures (below) showing the back of the chiller, and I can see it poking out of the ceiling from the room adjacent the cellar (again, see pics below).

• I am reaching out to the contractor with a long and detailed list of questions and thoughts. I will bring any interesting responses to this forum. But, in the interest of others benefiting from my problem, here are the pertinent points/questions I am raising:

Possible Problem #1 - The chiller is not functioning properly

  • This does not seem to be the case, but I suppose it is possible
  • Is this chiller designed to drop a temperature down to any of it’s possible set temps despite the immediate surrounding ambient temp (even if only briefly)? It seems like it should be. If so, is the fact that it cannot a sign of a chiller or insulation problem?
  • How would we even determine whether the chiller is functioning properly?
  • Can Wine Guardian directly look at the set up? Do they have service reps in the area?

Possible Problem #2 - The chiller is not sufficient for the space

  • Also unlikely, the space is about 500 cubic feet and the chiller is rated to 1500 cubic feet
  • Did we make a mistake with a TTW unit? What would be involved (time, expense, etc) for a split system? Is this even a reasonable idea?

Possible Problem #3 - There is an insulation problem

  • This is starting to seem more probable, and anyone I speak to who has a cellar asks about this
  • Is the fact that it cycles on/off pretty fast in the winter at 57° – and blows continuously in the summer even at 61° – a sign that this is the problem?
  • I would expect a properly insulated room to lose heat much more slowly than this room does
  • It seems like the chiller is trying to compete against a constant inflow of ambient air, and this may be why it cannot drop below certain set temperatures
  • What kind of insulation did Mike use in the walls and ceiling? What was the R value of this insulation?
  • How would we determine an insulation problem?
  • How would we fix an insulation problem now that the cellar is fully built?

Possible Problem #4 - Everything was built fine and is functioning fine

  • This would imply that there is some other problem that we just might never identify
  • I’ve spoken with several people in Chicago with basement cellars. Some admit that their chiller runs longer in the summer, but none have the problems that I am having with achieving set temp or constant blowing of the chiller.
  • This leads me to believe that though it is challenging to achieve temperature equilibrium, it is certainly not impossible and that my issues are not typical.
  • If we leave the cellar as is, the wine will certainly be fine, but
  • The life of the chiller will decrease, and we may find ourselves going through several of them in our lifetime
  • Our electricity bills will certainly suffer
  • Do we just accept that the cellar will not function as I had expected and move on?

Some additional random questions about the chiller, for my understanding

  • Is the chiller designed to blow colder air when you decrease the set point, or just blow longer at the same output temperature?
  • Does the chiller always blow air of the same temperature? Does the output temperature ever vary?
  • What is the expected lifespan of the chiller?
  • What is the ideal cycling on time and off time in order to achieve that lifespan?
  • What are the triggers for the chiller to turn off and on?

• I am attaching some of my measurements from late November 2015 in Chicago, note that the series of 3 measurements at each location correspond with chiller set points of 57, 55, 52:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXc1ZlWl9LMFZiYlk
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXT0pnWUJLbnpWZDg
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXcnBnR0hjMURfZHM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXTDg4a3hkR09JSDQ
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXWXNaTEV4Z0VGV3c
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXczg2Z0h1WFpWcVk
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXQVVjV1JaZUxnc1U

• Here are some photos of the cellar:
Exterior
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXdS1yeUpJbVhKMWc
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXbWVrUWkzeUlxb3M

Facing the back of the cellar
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXTEtSNWJPRk14Xzg

Facing the front (left) from the back
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXY0JKblZwNUMwSHM

Facing the front (right) from the back
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXbUFPYlRsYWg5YzQ

The left door houses the back end of the chiller and the ducting
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXeDZGcm54Q3NZeVE

Detailed back end view of the chiller/duct
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXamNTWmFfUGdKakk

The duct continues across the room and to the bottom…
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXeUtJeW5qaWVyVTg

…where it vents into the hallway
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3jpFSYFftuXQ0pjYjRIekxSTkk

• I have noticed some very unusual and concerning trends that bring me right back to my problems this past winter, when the chiller could not get the room down to 55. First, I decided to raise the set point from 57 to 60 (since it was not getting below 60 in the first place). The chiller shut off, and I checked several hours later. It blows continuously and displays 60. I set it to 61, and the same thing happened. It shut off, and then 30 minutes later it is blowing and displaying 61. Three hours later, it is still blowing and displaying 61. I raised the set point to 62. Same thing. It shuts off for a bit, then starts blowing, and blows continuously while displaying 62. So even though it demonstrates an ability to get down to a certain temperature, it seems to have great difficulty chilling below the set temperature.

• Second, I played around with my IR thermometer a bit more. I know that someone told me to ditch it, but I’m just looking for correlations and leads to act on. My liquid bottle thermometer was reading 60.1, and the IR thermometer showed 60.6. Good enough. So what I have found is that my floor is warmer than my ceiling. Now, I should preface this by saying that we know that we have floor heating in the basement. However, the contractor told us that we do not have it under the cellar. We did not build the home, we bought it a couple of years ago, and there is no floor heating depicted anywhere on the blueprints (but we definitely have it), so we went with his assessment. The location of the cellar was not originally a “useable” part of the basement, it was essentially a dungeon-like storage area that was no finished at all. The original flooring where the cellar now sits was poured concrete, and so all together it seemed logical to us that this would be a very unusual location to need floor heating. We believed his assessment, and until today I really had no reason to second guess it. Anyhow, I have discovered that the floor is currently measuring anywhere from 70-73 degrees with my IR thermometer. This is while the chiller shows 62, the walls show anywhere from 60 to 65, and the ceiling shows anywhere from 62-65. Sure enough, the bottles closest to the floor are measuring 64-65, and those that are in line but close to the ceiling measuring 60-62. Strange.

• So I asked my wife about the floor heating and whether it was on or off. She was advised by our HVAC people to start it up mid summer, as it is very slow to build (and also to recede) and takes weeks to months to get to full effect when turned on or off. Sure enough, she turned it on a couple of weeks ago. We turned it off to see what happens.

• Even stranger is that there appear to be pockets in the cellar where the floor is warm in a single 1x1 foot area. Like, I can feel it with my bare feet. In fact, this is what first made me check these floor temps today. It feels like a warm spot in the floor, and I can move my IR thermometer across the floor and predict exactly where it starts and stops. Is this a curiosity of the ground under my home? Is this evidence of floor heating, which I was assured was NOT present where the cellar was being built? Who knows.

• What is even stranger yet is that during the winter, when the floor heating was cranked to full effect, there did not appear to be any floor/ceiling disparity like there is now. See my measurements taken in late November above for details. So why is this popping up in the summer? You would think that in the winter the problem would be even more obvious, but the floor and ceiling were actually pretty close in temperature back then.

So I have no idea where to go from here. I’m obviously not going to tear down the cellar to take corrective measures that might or might not work. I just have no idea what to do with the chiller. And now that I have these weird pockets of warmth on the floor, I need to figure out if I should place my long term storage bottles in areas that are demonstrably cooler, and my short term storage bottles in the slightly warmer areas?

Anyhow, thanks again for everyone’s insight. Sorry if this was a massive information dump. It’s how I roll.

49

Another update. At a set point of 62, it finally just shut off after blowing for about 30 minutes or so, suggesting a trend towards equilibrium. The chiller is displaying 62. I had reset both my air and liquid min/max thermometers when I set it to 62 today. The air min/max shows 63.9 (min 63.0, max 63.9), the liquid one shows 59.9 (min 59.0, max 60.0).

But then five minutes later, I checked again and it was back on, and now the chiller displayed a temp of 64. A two degree rise in 5 minutes.

The room is thermally leaking. [cry.gif]

50

A preview of the email I just sent to my contractor:

Hi [Redacted],

I continue to monitor and observe, but things are not looking promising with the temperature regulation in the cellar. I think that we have an insulation problem, and I’ll explain why in a moment. I know that this project was complete 9 months ago, but given the problems we had in the winter and now in the summer, I think that we need to decide if there is anything that can be done.

First, some updates. After talking with you on the phone, I had [my wife] raise set the temp on the WG from 57° to 60° around 6:00 pm because it simply never got below a reading of 60°. I checked the cellar at 10:00 am the next morning when I came home from work, the WG was still displaying 60°. But it was constantly blowing, and so I set it to 61° and it immediately turned off. However, I checked several times throughout the day. It continued to display 61° (even at 5:00 am when it was 68° outside), and it still continuously ran and ran, and never dropped below it’s set point of 61°. So I set it to 62°, and it ran for quite some time. It finally did shut off at some point. I checked on the status, and the chiller was not blowing. The display temp was 62°.

Now, here is a major reason that I think we have insulation issues. After seeing that it had finally shut off, I came back in just five minutes to check again, and now the WG was blowing again. This time, the display temp was 64°. The temperature in the room had gone up 2 degrees in just five minutes.

And I think this is the major clue to the problem. It all makes perfect sense to me now. I think that the room is not properly insulated and is letting in too much heat. In the winter, the ground/environment/house/air is much colder, and so the WG is able to “neutralize” this heat at a much lower temp, about 55°. Only at 57° does it actually overcompensate and allow itself to shut off because it drops below the set point. But in the summer, it neutralizes at 60°-61°, and is only able to overcompensate and finally shut off at 62°. But then heat enters so quickly that it comes right back on a few minutes later, and it takes 30+ minutes of blowing cold air to once again overcompensate and start the cycle again. This perfectly explains what we dealt with in November and what I am experiencing now. It does not seem that the unit itself is functioning poorly – it is simply trying as hard as it can to overcome the influx of heat.

If this is indeed the case, I’m not really sure where to go from here. My expectations were that we would be able to set the cellar to some temperature (55° would have been ideal, but even 57° or 58° would have been fine), and regardless of the season it would stay within a degree of this temperature or so with only occasional running of the chiller. Kind of like a refrigerator. In other words, I thought that the cellar would hold a temperature much more tightly than it does. I know people with wine cellars that are no bigger than mine in our local area, and their cellars – even in the summer – run on for 5-10 minutes and are off for 30-40 minutes. It is not really acting like a cellar or a refrigerator right now, but rather like my car’s AC that is constantly on in order to neutralize heat.

So here are some questions I have with the assumption that this is the issue:

  • What kind of insulation did [Redacted] use in the walls and ceiling?
  • What was the R value of this insulation?
  • Were there alternative solutions or higher grade materials that we could have used?
  • How would we determine 100% for sure that we have an insulation problem?
  • How would we fix an insulation problem now that the cellar is fully built?

Like I said, I’m not really sure what to do at this point. Please let me know what your thoughts are.

Thanks,

  • Ben
51

The 18 degree thing is generally considered bunk and I believe came from the following source:

It has been discussed here a bunch in the past.

52

You may be underinsulated but the warm floor seems like a more serious source of incoming heat.
I would want to understand where that heat is coming from and take steps to mitigate it.

53

I have been following along, but now I think I missed something. What is beneath your cellar? Just earth, right?

I am sorry, I went to go back over everything and must have missed it!

One more thing, and it helped us save energy…

Go to a home store and buy some of that 1 inch thick stiff insulation and cut two pieces to fit the window in the door.

Then, get some attractive upholstery fabric and cover the pieces of insulation and use mirror mounts to affix them on each side of the door window.

I think you will be impressed!

We used an “outdoor” door for our cellar and then put the fabric panels over the glass. This is the only pic I have handy, but we have been happy with it. During the hottest week of the year, 108, or so, for several days, and a week >100, we noted a climb to only 57 degrees.

54

This might be the place to start with your focus. I assume by “floor heating” you mean radiant heating in the floor. That certainly could be possible and might be a good way to heat a basement. However, it is highly unlikely the floor heating would be running in the summer - if it’s heated via a boiler, that won’t be running; if it’s electric, figure out how to turn it off!

But, if the floor is reading 70-73, it means that there’s a lot of heat transmittal through the floor and you have what sometimes is called an “infinite heat sink” - basically the heat of the earth is unlimited and keeps coming into the cellar - it’s like you’ve left the door open. It’s a little odd because typically this is determined by ground temperatures, which in Chicago even in the summer should be in the 50s at a depth of 6 feet. That said, the slab is going to conduct heat from other parts of the slab into the cellar as well, so that could raise the slab temperature.

What is your flooring in the cellar? If it’s bare concrete, that’s going to be your problem. You need to insulate it somehow to slow the heat gain from the flooring. The good thing is that this may be relatively easy to do - you may need to remove racking and wine to do it, but you don’t necessarily have to rip out the walls. There are various ways to do it, including something as simply as preformed styrofoam boards covered with some modular flooring.

55

I have seen that done, seems easy to accomplish.

56

I love a good mystery [popcorn.gif]

57

Unless the racks are custom floor to ceiling! Then raising the floor presents some additional challenges (although probably less than ripping out walls too.

58

some comments:

  1. in my previous cellar the cooling also switched on way too often; the advice I received was to place the temperature sensor of the cooling unit a bit away from the cooling unit and place it inside an empty wine bottle (this was possible as the sensor was attached to a five foot wire and you could take out the sensor after unscrewing the front of the unit). This worked very well; the running and shut down intervals of the cooling unit probably were 3 to 5 times as long as before the changes. Initially the unit was measuring the air temperature. That can drop very quickly with some cooling, yet after the initial cooling phase the bottles/walls/floor will still be very close to the old temperate and quickly heat up the room again after the cooling unit had switched off

  2. put some more mass in the room. 450 bottles is not a lot of mass to store energy given the size of the room. The more mass (such as bottles but could perhaps also be additional thickness of plaster board on the walls on the inside of the cellar) you will have in there, the better will the stability of your temperature be

  3. the floor seems a clear problem that needs to be resolved; could it be that some pipes/hoses leading to and from the floor heating are running through the floor underneath the wine cellar? That could maybe just be enough heat to heat up the cellar in the summer, but maybe not in the winter months. I would switch the heating off and keep it switched off until I really need it for warming up the house. It seems very, very early to start to switch on the floor heating for efficiency purposes. It also can’t be really that efficient to have the heating on when you have the cooling unit on as well. As other have said, I would also put some insulation on the floor if that is possible.

Good luck!

59

Lots of good advice here, many thanks again to all, I’ll respond later but just wanted to add some new data before I head off to work. I recorded several hours of audio in the cellar last night, and was able to extrapolate the data to determine time on/off. This data is all at a set point of 62°. The air min-max thermometer displays 63.0°-64.1°, and the liquid min-max thermometer displays 61.1°-62.0°. The chiller has an on-off ratio of about 1.5, or in other words is on 60% of the time and off 40% of the time.

It is interesting that the time of is consistently right around 6 minutes. In other words, the cellar heats up enough within a six minute period to cross above the set point temperature.
Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 9.26.53 AM.png
Screen Shot 2016-07-29 at 9.27.05 AM.png

60

Also, the contractor emailed me back about the insulation, here was the response:

I talked with [Redacted] yesterday and he was telling me about how you are having problems with the cooling of your wine cellar. First of all, I just want to say that I am really sorry you are having to deal with this still, and I can understand if you are frustrated at this point. I think it is completely reasonable for you to want a wine cellar that will keep you wine at a constant temperature. [Redacted] was saying you were concerned about the insulation. I just want to assure you that I insulated your cellar the same way I have insulated all the cellars I have done over the past years. I use a 6mil plastic vapor barrier on the outside of the cellar and then insulate with fiber glass insulation. The R-value of the insulation in your cellar is actually greater in most places than the minimum required because I used 2x6 construction for all the walls I built (the only exception being the wall that was already there which is 2x4). This allowed me to use thicker insulation. The 2x6 walls are all R-19 or greater (I think they are actually R-21, but I am not positive), and for the ceiling I used R-30, and the one 2x4 wall is either R-13 or R-16. The recommendation for cellars is R-13 for 2x4 walls, so your cellar meets or exceeds this in all cases. I know I am getting a little technical but I just wanted to assure you that the cellar is well insulated. Again, I’m really sorry you are dealing with all this, and I know you are just wanting to find a solution at this point. Hopefully this helps put your mind at ease a little about the insulation of the room.

I emailed back to ask about the floor, which is an obvious source of new concern. Interestingly, the floor today is a bit lower in temp, measuring 68-70. Still seems too warm to me, given that the walls and ceiling are 60-65.