My “wine room” is a small closet in the northeast corner of our fully subterranean basement. We live near Rochester, NY, very close to the shore of lake Ontario. The conditions seem acceptable for storage of wine; however, just for curiosity sake, I want to monitor temperature and humidity trends. Can anyone recommend a monitor that is reliable and inexpensive?
I’ve had very good experience with La Crosse technologies…
http://www.amazon.com/Crosse-Alerts-926-25101-GP-Wireless-Monitor/dp/B0081UR76G/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1443806832&sr=8-8&keywords=la+crosse+monitor
Hi Jeff. I’m just across the lake.
For the passive cellar I use a remote weather station from RadioShack when they were still around.
I keep the remote monitor (size of a cell phone) in the passive cellar and the receiver (which is also a monitor, about the size of an ipad mini) in my active cellar. I think it was $40 or $50 about 10 years ago. Never had an issue with either & the aa battery lasts about 2-3 years on the receiver/monitor and about 1 on the remote monitor. It measures temp & humidity and highs/lows for both. Suits my purposes fine, as we don’t spend long periods of time elsewhere and typically only travel for a week or two at a shot. You may want to use something with remote app monitoring if you travel or have another home.
rYou can spend a lot more if you’d prefer something “made for wine cellars”.
Same here. The alerts actually saved part of my collection when one AC failed (it texted me when the temp reached 62F, so I was able to prevent a disaster)
JF
Depends on exactly what you want to do:
Radio Shack type monitor is good if you want to look every so often at what the temp and humidity is within your house.
Lacrosse is best “cheap” solution for monitoring away from house. It also keeps a log of temps so you can see how it changes over time - e.g., you can see fluctuations during day.
I have both - easy screen to look at within house; Lacrosse for when I’m away and alerts.
It is unnecessary to monitor remotely, as the conditions in the basement are what they are. I guess what I really would like to know is what the daily temp/humidity is, and how it changes during the year. I am probably not OCD enough to observe and record readings daily. Although that might be the cheapest solution.
If you don’t want to monitor remotely there are inexpensive USB data logging devices that sample every 5 minutes, hour, etc. and retain months or years of data. Jack into your computer and a histogram is displayed. I use one for my grand piano, I think the brand is Lascar.
I used a La Crosse technology wireless monitor for years. When I bought it, the darn thing would not stop logging the temperature/humidity every 5 minutes, which I thought was excessive. I emailed the company repeatedly, as their website shows options of 20 minutes, 1 hour, etc… for timestamps, but all of the settings resulted in a measurement every 5 minutes. Finally, the company said “Well, that’s the way it works!”, so I used it like that. What was interesting there was that at 5 minute intervals, I got to see that the temperature varied quite a bit near the ceiling of my basement, while the temperature remained consistent near the floor.
I did not like the fact that they only store your temperature data for 7 days! For years they had a data retention of 30 days, which I thought was barely adequate. I had to set a calendar reminder every 4 weeks to go on their website, pull the data and store it in excel. Now that they’ve lowered their retention to only 7 days, I wouldn’t even consider buying one of these. I work in the hard drive / flash drive industry, and all I can say is LaCrosse should buy a fricking hard drive to store their customers data. It’s a tiny amount of data for customer. They could store 3 months of data for 4 million people on a single 4TB hard drive.
At about the same time they lowered their retention time to 7 days, my device quit working. Well, I got a few years of temperature logging out of it, so I’m ok with that. But overall, I am dissatisfied with the company and the product. If I were to do it again, I would look at buying one of those temperature/humidity logging thumb drives.
I have this one in my cellar, it is very accurate and reliable, but slightly more expensive perhaps if you just need one to evaluate whether your basement is good for storing wine.
However, you can continue to use it afterwards in your cellar when it is filled with wine, so that you know exactly how the temperature fluctuates (if any) during the year.
Netatmo.
I’ve had them all, it wins hands down.
I am in a similar situation, with a good passive cellar which, at the beginning, I wanted to monitor for temperature fluctuations and maxima. Realizing that the temperature did not fluctuate at all, and only changed very slowly was easy (check at different times of the day over a couple of week).
The only other issue were then max/min temperature (and humidity) and I found cheap digital thermo-hygrometers, which are able to record just that, not the continuous changes. Such a thing should be widely available and cheap. Do you need more than that?
Assuming these devices are accurate, I do not need more than that. Will look into this option.