How soon would you know if the cooling or humidity in your wine cellar were outside of a desired range? Are you checking it frequently? What if you travel often or have multiple homes with wine cellars?
Over the past 10 years, the cooling unit in my home cellar has failed three times. It's not clear how many days passed each time before I noticed (fortunately, San Francisco is rarely even in the 70s). The point is, the risk of having wine damaged by unforeseen events is real and the time and effort to replace what might be years of effort collecting special bottles is hard to even fathom.
The CellarSensor solution
CellarSensor is a product and monitoring service from CellarCentral.com which enables you to monitor your wine cellar conditions (air temperature, bottle temperature, and humidity) remotely using sensors that communicate via the Internet every 15 minutes (24/7) to CellarCentral's data center. One or more designated people can be notified by phone or email-based alerts (get a sample phone alert) in the event of various conditions occurring based on parameters you set such as:
- High temperature
- Low temperature
- High relative humidity %
- Low relative humidity %
- No data (such as might occur if a power failure)
Charts and reports are also available (see sample).
The San Diego-based company was founded by Chris Womack, a former HP engineer, and launched its initial sensor products and monitoring service in March 2007. Chris went through multiple generations of designs and tests to arrive at his current product set which is manufactured to his specifications in Japan.
VinCellar integration
We liked CellarSensor so much we decided to integrate it into our new VinCellar cellar management application (see today's press release). When using VinCellar, users are able to link their CellarCentral.com account to their VinCellar account and see a widget of key condition metrics (for 1 or more cellars) on the home page of their VinCellar account.
In addition, we decided to become a dealer for the hardware sensors to provide one-stop shopping for VinCellar users. For clients of our Personal Cellar Manager service, we will install the sensors on-site and become one of the people assigned to monitor alerts.
How CellarSensor works
The diagram below says it all:
How much is it?
The major cost components are:
- Base station
- Air Temp/Humidity sensor
- Liquid bottle temp sensor
- Monitoring and alerting service
A CellarSensor Starter Kit Standard (items 1 and 2 plus one year of monitoring) is $498. A CellarSensor Starter Kit Plus (which adds #3) is $648. Additional sensors are $199 each and up to a total of 16 can be supported with one base station (see product specification sheet for more details). After the first year, the monitoring and alerting service can be extended in 1,2, or 3-year increments for $199, $379, or $559 respectively (roughly $15.50-$16.50 a month).
As signing up for CellarSensor is a form of loss prevention, we've checked with AIG and they are willing to offer a discount on their wine collection insurance to their policyholders for deploying CellarSensor. Depending on how much wine you have insured, this could effectively underwrite the cost of most or all of the CellarSensor solution. If you're an AIG policyholder (or want to investigate switching), contact Jennifer Wolf of AIG at 415-836-2790 or jennifer.wolf@aig.com.
Want to get it?
Just call us at 415-946-1300 during business hours or email service@vinfolio.com.