What is the best cooling unit? There is a KoolR system that vents inside the house that we are considering although there is an exterior wall we can vent to if that is better. How much noise does the KoolR (old name ChillR) make if anyone knows? We have two fridge style wine coolers downstairs now & they are fairly quiet & not on often.

I've read something about venting into the ceiling? Does this mean I can put it in the ceiling & vent between the floors? How noisy would this be (the room is below my kitchen). How about into my existing duct system -- how much humidity & noise would this involve if we did this?

What is the best floor option? We are thinking of using slate. Right now the floor is unfinished concrete.

Does painting the walls hold up? (I know we have to use greenboard). Our contractor also recommended he can do a plaster stone treatment over the boards -- is that necessary re humidity?

We have a dishwasher above the storage area. If I put extra insulation there will this be sufficient re any vibrations?

Thanks all. Any other tips from your experience would be greatly appreciated.

Sharon

I think that the best cooling unit would be one that is sized well for the room and also fits your wallet. I'd love to have a Breezaire unit with the nice in-bottle temperature probe but they were just too pricy for me so I went with the Koolspace ChillR 900. It only shows the temperature up near the ceiling where it's mounted so to get around it I bought one of the inexpensive La Crosse temperature monitors with the outdoor probe and just put the probe on the middle rack next to a bottle of wine and it works well to tell me from the living room what the temperature is in the cellar. The ChillR 900 is a very quiet unit - about the noise level of a very small air conditioner / humidifier.

I've not done any research on the vent to ceiling method but I'd guess they're talking about into more of an attic space than into floor joists since the unit moves a fair bit of air and unless the ceiling is a plenum I don't think it'd work. From what I read, the ChillR units are made to vent into a conditioned space and not into ducts or anything else so you'd need a different unit if you were going that way.

For a floor, I went with one of the laminates since I could put it in in a weekend and it feels warmer than stone if you're getting a bottle of wine in your socks. It's lasted very well for the past few years and I ended up putting a rug in the room to soften the look (of course, after I dropped the first bottle of wine on the floor and thought softer would be better!). I think tiles would be nice too as long as you're using a grout that is meant for bathroom floors.

I decided not to try greenboard and paint so I went with beadboard plywood and just stained / urethaned it but I don't see why a paint designed for bathrooms wouldn't stand up just fine since they're supposed to be designed for high humidity applications.

I don't think you have a big issue with the dishwasher above the storage area. The vibrations of the dishwasher would have to go through the first level floor, across the joists, through the insulation, down the walls and into your racking before it's going to impact the bottles so you should be good.

Tips:

- Be really sure you get the right size unit (in your case, the 900 should be fine since assuming you have an 8' ceiling, you've got about 600 cubic feet to cool).

- Have an idea of how warm your basement gets in summer before you do the installation. Since you're going to want to keep the wines around 60 degrees, the basement must stay cooler than 80 degrees. I blew up the first Koolspace that I had by venting the basement for a week or so to the outside in the middle of summer when the temperature got to about 85.

- Don't skimp on insulation ... especially on the floor. They're not kidding when they want R-20 to R-30 and it both saves money on electrical and lets the cooling unit work less to maintain a temperature. Your contractor will probably have a better idea of what to do here - for my installation I ended up going with 2" rigid foam board on the floor (after testing to make sure the basement floor was dry), R-18 fiberglass for the walls and ceilings with an additional 1" rigid foam on top of the insulation and the cooling unit probably comes on once every 1/2 hour in the height of summer.

That's a nice sized room you're planning ... you could even fit a small seating area and table in it and still have space for a lot of wine. Good luck with the project.

Your tip on insulating the floor was great as we had not even thought of that nor did the wine cellar equipment supply company we spoke to even mention it. Does that mean you have a slight step up into your cellar as we would if we build up the cellar floor. I also won't bother looking into the vent into floor / duct work based on what you have suggested.

Re the ChillR, the company that sells them here told me yesterday I would have to avoid putting wine bottles 2 feet to the left, right and bottom of the unit due to air flow since we only have 7foot ceilings and would not be able to put it above a doorway. Given that we would lose a lot of storage we are now considering a Breezaire split system. That should solve my noise problem as well. We are still debating as to whether to put the condensing unit outside our basement door or inside a small electrical room in the basement. Any ideas on that?

We are not considering a seating area as there is a space outside the wine cellar itself where we will be doing that. We are instead thinking of putting a double row of racking along one small wall to increase capacity for longer term stored bottles. Not sure yet how best to do this.

Sharon

When you add some insulation on the floor, it does create a little step-up. If you look at Lowes / Home Deopt, they make thresholds for doors that have a little ramp that takes care of it nicely and you never really notice the rise.

The Breezaire split system is a really nice system and it'll definitely solve the noise problem since all you'd be hearing is air movement and not the sound of the compressor. Since it's a split system, I think that either spot would do but you want to check with the manufacturer / vendor since my guess is that there are limitations (or additional costs) associated with the distance between the two sections due to piping and wiring and possibly heat dissapation in the electrical room.

Wine room layout is not the easiest thing in the world to do since it's really spatial and you'll need to come up with a system or use a computer to remember which bottle is where ... at least I do since after a couple of hundred bottles my mind just stops keeping track. Depending on who you are going to buy your racking from, many of the places offer free or low cost layout planning help if you use their systems so you might want to try to hit them online (like IWA-wine or wineracks.com) and see what they can do for you.

If your configuration is like I described, you need most insullation on the ceiling. The vibrations from your dishwasher won't be a problem anyhow - the dishwasher is above and it's hard to imagine how it would shake the floor of the wine cellar.

I simply have the same concrete floor as the rest of the basement. My cellar is for storage, so I just wanted it to be functional. It's about the same size as you describe.

Vapor barriers can be something to think about. If you have a large difference in temp between your cellar and the surrounding space, you can get condensation. in an unheated basement, the problem is more likely against the ceiling than the walls, but each place is different. Generally you put the vapor barrier against the warm side, but that's not a brilliant idea for a ceiling, especially if your joists and flooring is wood, which is probably the case.

I don't understand your question about paint. What is your concern? Also, remember that greenboard doesn't really insulate all that well. I was worried about flooding in the basement even though we've never had any, so I used wonderboard, or cement board, like you would use for a bathroom. I also have six inch walls so I could put a lot of insullation in, and I built my own door which is also six inches. If you use extruded polystyrene, you get the maximum insulation per square inch. Thermax, which has foil on one or both sides, is slightly better but deteriorates over time and there is some literature about toxins, so rather than worry about any of that, I just used polystyrene.

I also built my own wine racks. If you use individual racking, you lose a lot of space to air, but that is the most convenient for looking at your bottles. If you use some kind of bin, Rhone shaped bottles and anything that's slightly weird can be a real pain to stack. So I made shelves. A Bordeaux bottle is 3" diameter, a Burgundy bottle is about 3 1/4", but some of the Rhones are a little larger and things like Turley, or Champagne, or some Beaujolais, are even larger. So I made shelves spaced at 3 1/2 inches, with a few at the bottom that are 4" and the top which is about 5" for anything weird. That was the compromise that allowed me to get the maximum bottles with the least amount of lost space. Bins are better but as I said, a pain. I did one wall with bins and probably wouldn't do that again.

For cooling, you have a lot of options. You can do a split system. You can get a Whisperkool or Breezeaire or something similar. But remember, those coolers are simply air conditioners. AC units don't go down below 65 or so because they'll ice up. So the compressors are sized slightly differently and the evaporation coils are sized slightly differently than the wine chiller units. If you got your AC to go to 60 or below, you wouldn't have adequate evaporation. So what to do? Get a larger unit. The smallest room AC is about 3000 BTU, or 5000 BTU, which is far more than you need to get that small room cool. If you trick it, you can get it to cool to the 50s or so and you're in good shape. I just bought a $99 Samsung and the temp is around 59 - 62 degrees F. You can pull the thermostat wire thru the grill, which gets you about 5 degrees right there, and you can tape a small resistor to it that gets you another few degrees, and you spent $99 for a cooling system that works fine. I'm not going to get into an engineering description of cooling systems, but people modify big ACs for meat lockers if they're hunters, and it actually works pretty good for a wine cellar. But a spare in case you burn it out and use the savings for more wine.

Hands down the best book I have come across with detailed wine cellar testing and building is 'How and Why To Build a Wine Cellar' by Richard M. Gold, Ph.D.

Hope this helps,
Chris

Mine is a 42x57" closet with a Breezeaire (NEVER AGAIN, BUT IT'S CURRENTLY WORKING) cooler thrugh to the unfinished basement. The walls are just crudely racked in bins. I can get about 600 bottles in there.

I made an insulated door by taking a cheap interior door, cutting off the interior veneer, scraping out all the cardboard that they fill the space with, putting a piece of 2" rigid insulation there, and then sticking a new piece of thin plywood over the insulation. Weatherstrip everything good.

Definitely get Gold's book. Most of it is useless, but he does a great job of explaining why you want particular kinds of insulation and why you want a steady temperature. The $25 it will cost is the price of a bottle, and the info that you do use is well worth the price.

I used a combination of pink insulation and rigid insulation in the construction.

I used 8ml vapor barrier floor, cieling and walls

R30 in the cieling, R22 walls, R15 over the concrete floor and a custom made R20 door.

The cooling unit is rated for 200 cu ft - 300 cu ft room. My room is 150 cu ft and will hold about 550 bottles - very cozy!

Hygometer readings:

Current high low temps range from 55 deg F - 57 deg F.

Bottle temp is holding at 55 deg F steady; I filled a wine bottle with water and test it with a meat thermometer occasionally.

Humidity ranges from 65% - 74%...the lower number is just after the cooling unit cycles off. These are salt adjusted numbers; place a hygrometer in a zip lock bag with a soda bottle cap full of fairly moist salt. Seal and wait 8hrs...humidity should read 75%. If the hygrometer reads higher or lower adjust your actual readings.

The cooling unit has its own surge protected 15 amp electrical circuit wired to a manual generator switch.

The only inefficiency that I can observe, and never really thought about, is the heat sink in the concrete floor. Despite using R15 over the concrete floor in the cellar, the first 4' or so on the outside of the cellar is noticably colder than elsewhere. And the door seals against the full 4" of the raised floor - R10 between the door and floor framing. Just an FYI

Cost about $350.00 to insulated and build this space.

The second is a 4x6 foot closet in the basement of my Virginia home. I insulated it and installed the proper vapor barrier. Remember that the barrier needs to be continuous and on the warm side (typically the side closest to the rest of the house). That means wrapping the studs/joists if that surface is in place.

I made an insulated 24" door by removing the inner skin and all the cardboard used as a spacer in the door core and gluing 2" rigid insulation there and then facing it with a cut piece of thin luaun plywood. Weatherstrip the hell out of it.

The cooling unit is a small Breezeaire. The first one I got was DOA and the second has failed (fortunately by running continuously) once. Be sure to have some way to carry off the condensate, despite the claims the evaporator pan is not sufficient in my area.

I got a cheap indoor-outdoor thermometer and humidity gauge and poked the outside probe through the wall into the cellar and put the inside unit on the wall outside the cellar.

I added an automatic timer that shuts the lights off after 15 (or up to an hour) minutes (you can find these at Home Depot). The light is a single CF bulb anyhow.

The racking is two sets of simple rectangular plywood bins each hole holding about 12 bottles. They run from floor to celling. An old 36 bottle rack takes up the room under the breezeair unit.

This cost me next to nothing to build (I had the plywood lying around from a previous project) other than the cooling unit. Holds about 550 bottles. Typically there are six or so cases on the floor in inside the door that I haven't gotten around to opening up yet.

Next post for the other cellar.

The cooling unit is a split Emerson system. Works well. The entire house has a standby 80KVA generator. There is a CellarSensor temperature monitor in there. A 24,000 BTU/hr MovinCool which normally lives in the garage is available as a back up.