Wine fridge placement and service questions

WINE TALK
1

I am closing on my new house next week and all my stuff will be delivered, so lots of unpacking. after my divorce many years ago, I had to buy 2 wine fridges to hold my wine. 1 is your typical large heavy duty made for garage fridge. The other is more of a show piece. Nice looking, clear windows for display, kinda like a piece of furniture. for a few years I had been keeping it in a garage.

so now that everything is getting a fresh start (including myself), I need to decide now, before my wine arrives on a few things.

  1. Where to put the nice fridge. Inside or out. A few thoughts. Is it pretentious to have it inside? you know, the whole he is showing off thing. I feel there will be plenty of room for it. Also, I assume that the ones built for indoors will not last as long in a hot or real cold garage. I cant remember how loud the unit is when the AC runs in it, but Im sure it would be noticeable most of the time. which leads to my next question

  2. get them serviced? a preventative thing. the nice indoor unit is now 20 years old and never had an issue. it has a whispercool cooling unit. The garage unit is 14 years old and it has, I think, a cellarpro cooling unit. Neither unit has ever had a miss blowing cold air, even in the garage. so should I get a HVAC person to come look at the cooling units as they are empty? OR should I just buy new cooling units, again, as they are empty and will make replacing and or cleaning servicing easier?. I have about a week between the fridge deliveries and the wine delivery. I have no problem keeping the wine boxed for a while if I need to have more time getting then back to like new cooling condition.

I am sure I am over thinking this, but being single does have its issues at times, like this. needing someone to bounce ideas off of. anyway, thoughts? The nice unit I think is a Vinotheque 450 bottle one and the garage is the old school flat painted front that holds 700

thanks
john

2

The cooling units aren’t made to be serviced in a traditional HVAC sense as you can’t top them off with freon or anything. But while you are moving them, you should definitely take them apart and give the fins and fans a good cleaning.

Proactively buying a new unit is kind of silly since they are really expensive and newer doesn’t necessarily mean better as many report newish units croaking. Ride those puppies until they give out.

Depending on where you live, the garage can be a poor location because it gets too hot in the summer for the cooling unit to keep up (they are only designed to work inside a conditioned space) and/or it gets too cold in the winter so your wine gets spends a good amount of time in the 40s and sees large temperature variations throughout the year. But if you live in a temperate environment, that can be fine.

I have two inside. I’m not sure I would make it the focal piece of my living room, but I don’t think it’s abnormal to have it in an office or spare room or tucked away in a corner somewhere.