We had a short power outage this morning, which got me thinking about what people use for power backups on their home wine cellars or wine fridges.
At my office we have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for our computers and other electronics, but I think those generally are only good for an hour or two. I don’t think the temperature of the wine in the bottle would change much if power was out for only an hour or two, so I’m not sure how useful a UPS would be.
What about longer power outages, what are you using if anything? Generators?
does it get that warm in BC?? I have a natural gas generator for my entire house, but even if I didn’t I wouldn’t be concerned. My cellar is 10ft below grade and I live in MI so having active cooling is largely unneccessary.
If I lived in the South it would be a much bigger concern, but given the thermal mass of wine btls I would think it would take quite a while to warm them up significantly.
Gas powered generator for long outages. I run the cellar for an hour and shut for about 6. Continue on until restored or inside temperatures dictate. I am in the middle of pricing a NG whole house generator. Lif will be better when that is in place. As i approach 54, wearing winter /rain gear while monitoring and filling a generator is trying.
just gas powered generator. Had to use it 2 years ago when a big storm went through in the summer and knocked out power for a couple days. Would I get a whole house one? Probably not. At that expense level I’d rather just go with solar w/battery backup.
Our cellar is mostly below grade but we do have cooling units set at 55 degrees. Power was out for 5 days in the dead of summer with daytime highs in the mid 90s a few years back. I put 8 bags of ice in there at the outset and kept the door closed. The temp maxed out at 62 at the end of the 5 days. No doubt the presence of a lot of cool bottles helped slow the climb in temperature as well.
I live in Seattle, and my cellar is well-insulated. It is rare for our power to go out, as our local lines are underground. Years ago, before I had a custom two piece system, I had a Breeze-air that went out and I had to block off the hole in the wall with a piece of stryo and send the unit in for repairs. I was without cooling for several days. Nevertheless, due to the insulation, the temps stayed in the 52-56 range for several days…though I was careful not to go in and out more often than necessary. Of course, this might not apply to a free-standing cooler. Again, as mentioned, the cold bottles act to slow the rise in environmental temp.
I recently built my house from the ground up and had a 20K Watt natural gas generator installed that should power my whole house. I knew I wanted a backup generator for my cellar and found that the difference in cost to power just the wine cellar vs. the whole house was negligible compared to the overall cost.
I have a small Honda gas power inverter generator I use for our rv when we venture off the beaten path. I keep it at home just in case of a prolonged power outage. Of course I only have 5 gallons of fuel at a given time so that may give me a day…
I am leaning to moving all my wine to an offisite and selling my home cellars…
Fires are a problem here and the offisite is in a cave with bwck up generators and only about 15 minutes from my home.
Getting a small 50 bottle cooler for here would do the trick.
I had a whole house 22kw natural gas generator installed last year after a 2 day power outage. All our neighbors’ basements were flooded, yet mine did not - that was the last time I was willing to take a chance. I wasn’t worried about temps rising in my cellar as it is well insulated, but water damage scares me.
For those who are considering a large backup generator, you’ll know that there is a decision to be made between a partial and whole house. Many people will do a partial and leave A/C units off of it since the large appliances are why you need such a big generator - the initial load is what dictates size. However, it was cheaper for me to go whole house instead of partial because of the labor needed to separate the necessary circuits for a partial. When doing a whole, the labor simple as they just put the transfer switch inline with your external electric service and never need to get to your panel indoors.
I had put the purchase off for years, but I’m now really glad I have it with a cellar and a toddler. And to show just how mature I am, I always turn all my lights on when the power goes out just to establish myself as the Alpha Neighbor!
OP - you mentioned UPS devices: unless you go huge (EXPENSIVE) a UPS device won’t work. They are meant for short term power interruptions, not power supply. Something connected to a PC will likely last about 20 mins or so. The ones we have connected to our servers (commercial grade made for server rooms) are rated for 6-24 minutes of power backup. Their main job is to provide CLEAN power to your devices instead of potentially “dirty” power from your utilities company. Basically, they keep the power on while waiting for the backup generator to fire itself up after utility power is interrupted.
The power draw of a wine cellar air unit is likely much higher than a PC or even a server. I wouldn’t consider one an option unless you’re willing to spent a LOT - and even in that case, that unit will likely be as large as a backup generator and probably cost more with a finite amount of power.
It turns out that backup power for much more than a few days quickly turns into a highly nontrivial engineering problem.
Hopefully you would never need much more than a few days of backup, but extending your capacity from a few days out towards a few weeks is going require putting on your thinking cap.
And opening your wallet.
Stuff like deep cycle industrial batteries, and DC/AC inverters, and upgrading from 3600 RPM consumer grade engines to 1800 RPM commercial grade engines, and whether your engine is quiet enough to pass muster with the local zoning code nazis, and whether to ground or not to ground, and, if you choose to ground, how to keep your system from becoming a giant lightning rod which is simply going to vaporize in a great big BANG! and leave behind a giant crater in the ground the very first time that it encounters a significant voltage pulse.
Oh, and unless you have insider connections like Solyndra, anything involving solar is going to be prohibitively expensive.
This may be the most Nathan Smyth post ever. How did a simple question about being out of power for an hour or two turn into a few weeks and blowing up your home?
Any new consumer grade generator will have self diagnostics that’ll send you a text message long before you blow up the neighborhood. If you have a major power outage lasting more than a few days, it’ll likely be in the winter where you’d be able to turn off the generator for a couple of hours to have the oil changed / let the engine cool down in a worse case scenario. Even then, the vast majority of the time when they are running, it’s not running hard at all - like I said before, the big draws are for when your 220v appliances are initially turning on: A/C, washer/dryer, etc. If you’re worried about noise, liquid cooled are less noisy than air cooled - but today’s air cooled are pretty quiet. It’s hard to hear mine running while inside - nearly impossible from some places in the house.
My father was an electrician, I was close enough to the people in charge of installing our data center here at work and paid a lot of attention when purchasing my home. That all adds up enough for me to be an anonymous expert on the internet
Being in South Florida I have a 12 KW generator that runs on LP gas, unfortunately natural gas is not available in my subdivision.
Very quiet, much less so than a lawnmower.
At 12 KW it can’t carry the whole house, I have a manual transfer switch and then control loads through the breaker box.
The limiting factor for me is the size of my LP tank, at 500 gallons I can run +- 6 days at 12 hours per day. I don’t have the numbers in front of me but the part load fuel consumption is not proportional to the load so my strategy is to load it up when it is on and I rotate the high load appliances, A/C, water heater, dryer and Pool pump. Also I set temps for the cellar, refrigerator and A/C lower. We’ll see how the gas company does refilling my tank after our next hurricane.
I have a gas powered generator. Wine cellar, sump pump, refrigerators are all connected. I’ve only had to use the generator once when Superstorm Sandy hit but then it wasn’t hot out so I diverted the wine cellar to more lights.
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