We have a room in the basement that we think of as the wine cellar (because it contains wine). The ideal temperature we’d like to maintain in there is 13 °C (= 55 ° F). The room is about 8 x 10 feet, in a corner of the house with no insulation (so 2 of the walls are concrete). The room has a door.
The rest of the basement is insulated (styrofoam panels) and inhabitable (guest room, gym, main shower) so we keep it at normal room temperatures : about 20 °C (= 68 °F) in winter, 24 °C (= 75 °F) in summer. Heat is provided by permanent 240 V heating elements along the baseboards. Total area of the basement is about 1200 square feet.
Problem : In the winter, the wine cellar gets too cold. On a cold day, it can go down to 8 °C (= 46 °F).
In years past, we would plug in a small area heater (120 V - ceramic) with a thermostat. But I don’t like keeping one of those plugged in, in a closed room, for months at a time.
My position is that we should just keep the door ajar so that the rest of the basement will heat the room a bit. My hubby says that we should keep the door closed and use the area heater, otherwise we’ll lose too much heat to those uninsulated walls.
Who’s right? (Is it even possible to determine who’s right?)
The heat energy you’ll lose to the uninsulated walls will depend on the temperature of the wine room, not to the means by which that room is heated.
If the two possible heat sources are both electric, it’s reasonable to assume that they are equally efficient, and thus that the total cost will be much the same.
Yes, try insulation. The tops of the basement walls will have the most variation over the course of a year, making it too cold in winter, and not helping much to keep it cool in summer. The soil outside the bottom of the walls won’t vary nearly as much in temperature over the year.
Insulating the top half of the walls will help keep the room more uniform in temperature over the year. They make foam insulation boards, which would be less trouble to work with than fiberglass.
if you keep the door ajar you will loose more heat to the uninsulated room walls all the time you heat the rest of the basement. you will also have moisture from the heated area of the basement condense (given the right conditions) on the cold uninsulated room walls in the wine room, could promote mold growth.
As long as it doesn’t go below -6C or so, temperature variance is more important than absolute temperature. One of the great things about basements is that they have so much thermal mass the temperature barely budges. I’d keep the wine cellar unheated and serve whites immediately from the cellar but leave reds for 20 mins at room temp to warm up a bit.
I concur that you shouldn’t be worrying about your cellar getting too cold. I would, however, suggest you should worry about it getting too hot in summer. You might want to think about a double door to minimise heat ingress.