Cool Air Wine Fridge

[soltino]

I was chatting to the owner of our local Wine shop, and he mentioned that he was going to be buying a few Wine coolers (200 bottle storage) and asked me if I wanted to pick one up at the same time. I've been looking for a thermoelectric cooler for ages here in China and not having a lot of luck, so I asked him what sort of coolers he was getting.

He replied that there were two types - a standard fridge type or an air cooled version. "Yes!" I thought to myself, finally I had found what I had been looking for! I double checked with him and yes, this was not a wine "fridge", but used fans to keep the unit cool. He offered me the unit for the same price that he would be paying, so I jumped in.

A week later the 6ft tall monster arrived.... and the first thing I noticed was that it had a compressor at the bottom. But I thought this was supposed to be air cooled i.e. no compressor.... apparently not.... So I asked the owner and he says "Oh no, you need the compressor to cool the air before it is circulated throughout the unit"

So not thermoelectric at all! It is a "Cool-air" fridge.

Do any of you have any experience in this type of wine fridge at all? For 9 months of the year I can see this unit being okay as I won't really need to switch it on. The winters here are very dry, but a ton of beads will keep the humidity at 65% nicely so I'm not worried about winter at all. Temperature also won't be a problem for those months either.

It is only really Summer, when the humidity soars and I constantly battle 80% RH in my humidor when I will probably actually need to switch the beast on, and that is when I would be concerned about pumping frigid air around my precious smokes. My concern really is that the air will either be too cold and will damage the smokes, or too wet - although I would expect refrigerated air to be too dry actually...

So any advice/suggestions/comments would be gratefully received

If worst comes to the worst then I will have just bought an excellent Wine storage device, but no good for my smokes... or I should say I will have just bought the missus an excellent wine store as she is the wine buff more than me.... so Happy Christmas wifey!

And the moral of the story is, however good you think your foreign language skills are, they are NEVER good enough.

[goalie204]

while i can't really comment about the type of cooling, my unit (when it worked) was plugged in for the summer, because same thing here - in the summer its HOT. It's maximum setting was 64 degrees and that was it's temperature while plugged in, with an RH of about 60. The smokes were fine and smoking just as good as ever. I think we want to protect our investment, but the cigars are tough little guys that can survive maybe more than we think Just my personal experience