Case Study - The Wine cellar

Mr. I. had a cellar in a country house that he wanted to turn into a wine storage cellar. Being underground the cellar was very damp, with moisture at 95%RH, (basically water running down the walls!) which was not suitable for storing wine as the labels and corks would be damaged by mould.

Due to the latent heat gained from the process of dehumidification, using a conventional dehumidifier to lower the humidity would have increased the temperature in the cellar. The temperature would then have been too high for storage of wine.

A close control unit that gave temperature and humidity control was required. Unfortunately the smallest unit available on the market was in the region of 12kW, where only 3.5kW of cooling was needed in this cellar.

A Calorex dehumidifier was therefore used as a base unit, which was then subject to some on site alterations. These consisted of a remote condenser, bypass and check valves to the remote condenser, and a custom made electronic control panel with humidity and temperature controllers. This allowed the cellar humidity to be lowered to 50% RH (relative humidity), with the remote condenser acting as a heat dump to allow temperature control at 12°C.

The customer was very satisfied with the customized unit, the humidity and temperature levels have been controlled and the wine labels are not decaying.

Back to Case Studies >>