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temperature fluctuation in a wine cellar

12 years ago

Hello Everyone!

I recently purchased a WhisperKool 3000 and installed it in a 200 square foot cellar. I oversized the cooling unit as the cellar is located in the garage of my house. The cellar itself is 5 feet by 5 feet by 8 feet high. 3 sides of the cellar is built using 5 inch walls which consists of 2x4 studs with R13 insulation and 3/4 inch drywall (might be 5/8 inch drywall). The 4th side is the outside wall of the house, also using 2x4 studs with R13 insulation with 3/4 inch drywall on the inside and stucco on the outside. The cooling unit is on this wall, thus vents to the outside of the house. The ceiling of the cellar uses 2x6 studs with R19 insulation. The floor is bare concrete.

I put a monitor inside the cellar that takes temperature reading every 5 minutes, and noticed that the air temperature cycles up and down approximately 4-5 degrees every 2-4 hours. Water inside wine bottles fluctuates within 1 degree. In addition, there is good 3-4 degree differential in liquid temperature between the bottom half and top of the wine cellar.

With the WhisperKool set at 56 degrees and it's probe about 3/4 of the way up the rack on the same wall as the cooling unit, the water at the middle of the rack sits between 54-55 degrees. The bottle that is at the very top of the rack (which is just slightly above the top of the WhisperKool unit) sits around 60 degrees. But within each heigh of the racks, liquid temperature seems constant, except for the 1 degree fluctuation along with the air temperature as the cooling unit cycles.

Is this an acceptable fluctuation of temperature? If not, is there any recommendation you can make to further stabilize the temperature? Perhaps the location of the probe for the WhisperKool unit relative to the height/location of the probe? I also have a ceiling light in middle of the cellar, so I was thinking that putting in a ceiling fan to move the air within the cellar more might help? Or is this "good enough" and I should just leave it alone?

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Comment (1)

rosesinny
12 years ago
R 13 isn't really great insulation. In addition, the Whisperkool unit isn't designed to vent to the outside.

Cooling units are designed to operate within a general range of temperatures. So a fridge, an AC, and the Whisperkool unit are all designed to operate within their own unique parameters.

An AC unit usually goes 25 degrees or so and expects the top temp to be somewhere in the 90s. So you get cooling down to the mid sixties or so. They don't get things quite as cold when the exterior temps are in the high 90s or 100s.

A fridge is designed to cool down to the mid 30s or so, and to operate in an ambient temp of around 70. That's way past the condensation point, so you have really tight seals and super insulation.

The Whisperkool is designed to cool down to about 55 or so from an ambient temp of around 70, not the 90s you may experience outside.

It's not rocket science tho. If you want to get cooler, you need a larger evaporation coil and a more powerful condenser and you help the machine with tighter seals and better insulation. Thus, you can leave your door slightly ajar with a window AC unit and you'll still get fairly cool, but you wouldn't leave the fridge door slightly open.

To your main question - the one degree fluctuation is not all that bad. Don't sweat it.

To your larger question that you didn't ask - you're possibly overtaxing the Whisperkool unit. If it dies on you, you can replace it with a regular window AC unit. Just seriously oversize it, then tweak the thermostat - either replace / bypass it, or tape a resistor onto the probe so that it thinks the air is actually warmer than it is and it cools a bit more as a result. It's how I cool my wine cellar.
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