CellarSensor Wine Cellar Monitor
CellarCentral's service will help you monitor the temperature of your wine cellar, barrel room, or even individual tanks.
Here's how one local winery uses the system:
How we use CellarCentral in our winery
CellarCentral.com offers a really cool way to monitor the temperature in your wine cellar. The coolest feature is the website's ability to alert you via email or a phone call when the temperature or humidity are beyond certain points you've set.
I don't have a wine cellar, but as a winery owner I do have nine wine tanks that I like to keep tabs on. I've looked at many temperature alerting systems on the market, but they are expensive - and are mostly geared toward companies many times my winery's size.
Our glycol system runs on a circuit through around our winery and through our insulated barrel room. Three things add more than a bit of stress to my life:
1) When it gets really hot in the summer, the glycol system can overheat and flip a breaker. You need to physically flip the breaker to get it running again. Meanwhile, tanks and barrels steadily heat up.
2) Evaporation or a leak can lead to a low water/glycol level in the glycol reservoir. When this happens, the system shuts off until the level is topped off.
3) Someone may shut off the glycol system to do work on the circuit. This person may forget to turn it back on.
In all three of these cases, the system will stay off until someone fixes the issue. I'm not at the winery every day as I am often off doing sales calls, trade shows or events. The system will stay off until I return and in the 115 degree summers, this has the potential to create disaster in my winery.
And this is why I love CellarCentral.com's service. I have a few probes that monitor different areas of my winery:
1) An air temperature and humidty probe in the barrel room
2) A probe that is submerged in water to measure a liquid temperature (which changes much more slowly and is generally more accurate)
3) A probe that I affix (with insulation and tape) to the outside of my tanks. As long as it is insulated well, the tank tall temperature will be the same as the wine temperature. You need to make sure that you don't affix it on or too close to the glycol jacket though, obviously).
I set temperature high and low temperature thresholds for the probes. If the barrel room or tank temperatures go above 58 or below 52, I get an alert via email and also a phone call with a readout of the current temperature.
I can immediately go to the winery or call someone who can address the issue.
I can't tell you how much stress this aleviates from my life. I can go on vacations with my family now, knowing that I'll be alerted if something has gone wrong with the glycol system and a resolution is a phone call away.
Casey Cobb
Academy Culinary Wines
Concord, CA
http://www.academiewines.com
