Wine Cabinet Costs .....

Interesting post at Smells Like Grape blog. He bought a 35 bottle wine fridge and saw his monthly electricity costs double on installation.

"Doing some rough calculations I figure that our little 35 bottle wine storage unit is drawing about 138 kWh per month which at almost $.12 per kWh, is about $16.58 a month." he writes

Seems overly expensive for such a small cabinet, anyone know how much their cabinet is costing to run?

[Jenise]

I'd argue with his math in terms of being able to rent storage for his three cases at $3.30/mo (since there's a minimum charge/capacity at any facility, and you pay for that whether you fill it to the gills or store just three bottles), but otherwise, that's a lot to pay for a little unit. We have an under-count mount in the kitchen that I have no idea what it costs us to run. I didn't see that he mentioned which brand he bought--would be interesting to compare brands for energy efficiency. Would be worth it to spend twice as much going in on a more efficient (and possibly larger) unit--would pay itself back almost immediately. Can't say I've ever seen anyone include energy costs in their consideration when they've talked here about their options, though: it's always about how many bottles and what fits into their space.

I have a Chinese-brand cheapie, and I frankly noticed little difference before and after in my electric bills.

Now...keeping my entire townhouse cool for the wine that no longer fits in the wine cooller...that's another story

)I hate heat anyway...and we are having a very hot, dry early summer...it will be 90 in San Francisco tomorrow I love The City, but those "quaint" sidewalk markets and ancient pipes are not pleasant at 90 degrees!

I didn't see that he mentioned which brand he bought .

It was in the links, hebought a VinoView wine cabinet from Wine Enthusiast -- http://www.wineenthusiast.com/E/details ... ID=WEPLINK

The first link was where he talked about the difficulty he had finding buyer guides "It seemed that any consumer information available was reserved for the upper-end models"

Seems expensive to me at $399

Costs me $0 additional now for the 150 bottle cellar I have.

When the "we don't stand behind our product" Breezaire failed before the end of warranty and they refused to support me (despite K&L, who I purchased through, leaning on them btw), I started freezing 2 Liter bottles with water and putting them on a plastic container on the top rack. I change them out once a day and they keep the interior of the cabinet at a steady 58F during the summer. The basement drops to cellar temp during the cooler months, so I only need to do this about a vew months a year. I'm in the process of building a cellar, and I'm going to pipe my air conditioning into it during the summer months and see how things fare....