Does anyone have experience with placing a wine fridge in a garage with no temperature control? This is for an area with significant humidity and large swings in temperature over the course of a year – from potentially like 20 degrees to 100 degrees F at the extremes. Are there significant risks in doing this? Thanks!
I’ve got one in mine. It seems to work a lot harder out there than it should. I saw a kit to insulate the garage with foam panels at a friends. Gonna order one
I’ve had one for over a decade now, just a pretty basic old Vinotemp hand me down from a friend.
While living in Newport Beach, the temperature swings are quite small compared to just about anywhere else, my garage does face southwest and have some small slot windows, so in the summer or fall it can get fairly hot in there.
I bought a remote monitor thing once but was too lazy to deploy it. That would be a smart thing to do. Maybe I should dig that thing out of the closet.
I had someone look once into venting my garage, putting an exhaust vent fan and grate in there. But they couldn’t be sure where it was safe to cut into the walls of the garage of my old house, and so that fizzled out. Unfortunately, I have no other windows in the garage besides the ones on the garage door. I think that would have been great, though, to reduce the higher heat in there and save on power and wear.
One thing I do is get it serviced every couple of years, to try to stay ahead of a breakdown.
Like a lot of things in my life, I kind of just hope for the best, and so far, so good. It’s right on the way in to the house from the garage, so I do pass by regularly and poke my head in semi-regularly to see that it’s still going well.
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Manufacturers don’t even suggest putting normal refrigerators in no temp controlled garages. I would think the same rule applies to a wine refrig… I have a refrig in my garage but it is specifically made for unheated/uncooled garage. You can tell it’s different, it seals itself very tight and you can’t open it immediately after closing it while it is sealing.
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I’ve thought about it to move some from offsite, but have yet to pull the trigger. Seems there are more models now with greater ambient resistance for garages, etc.
This one is 35-110
stefanJr has had an 800 bottle wine fridge in his detached garage in Eugene for maybe 10 years. He has a heater near the fridge to use when the temperature gets really low; maybe in the 10s or 20s. It seems to do well even when the temperature reaches 100. No doubt there would be trouble if the compressor fails during a heat wave. Not so bad a set up if you have a sensor inside the cooler that gives you a warning when the temperature goes outside the range you set unless you happen to be out of town when that happens.
The fridges have to work harder, and the more frequently the compressor is cycling, the shorter the lifespan will be.
As Chris noted, there are some small preventative actions one can do around the margins that help: assisted ventilation, insulation, space between fridge / wall for cooling, keeping filters clean, dusting coils etc.
Somewhere here there is a thread on someone who took a big chest freezer and converted it into a wine storage unit with a custom thermometer / humidity control. Given the better insulation those might have versus a normal fridge that might something to consider too.
My garage ranges from 110F-30F, but we only have a spare fridge out there that basically keeps drinks/ice cream etc. cold. I keep wine fridges on separate circuits in the colder, covered parts of the air conditioned house. Still, I get nervous during the summer here.