The Denver Wine Cabinet Handbook · Part 3 of 7
Swamp cooler season: a June-to-September routine
An evaporative cooler cools a Denver house by adding water to the air and drawing it through open windows. That is not a fault in the machine; it is how the machine works. What it does is change the room your wine cabinet stands in — warmer than a sealed, air-conditioned house would be, and damper — and the cabinet has to reject its heat into that room every hour it runs. Denver Sub-Zero Repair Pros works to this page from June.
What the cooler changes
Two things, and only one of them is about water. The first is plain temperature: a cooler that keeps a house comfortable still leaves the room warmer than a compressor-based system would, and warm air is harder to dump heat into. Sub-Zero lists raised ambient temperature among the reasons a unit runs excessively, ahead of anything mechanical.
The second is the dew point of the room. Beads forming on the outside of a door frame are the room meeting its dew point on a cold surface. That is information about the air, and it needs treating as information rather than as a symptom from inside the cabinet.
The shape of the season
Front-load the work. Almost everything worth doing belongs to the week the cooler goes on and the week it comes off, and the middle of the summer asks only that you look at things occasionally and write down what you saw.
That matters because the season is long enough to hide a slow change. A zone that gains a degree in June and another in August never announces itself; it shows only against a note made on the first day.
Telling a room problem from a cabinet problem
One test settles it and takes a day. Shut the cooler down, close the windows it needs to run, and leave the cabinet alone until the same time tomorrow. Beading that has gone by then was the room. Beading that is still there, or a zone that has climbed and stayed up, belongs to the cabinet.
At that point the manufacturer’s own list for condensation forming inside a unit is short and worth running before anyone is called: is the condenser clean, is the door closing properly, has it been left ajar, and does the gasket have rips or tears in it.
The routine
- June, the week the cooler goes on Clean the condenser ahead of the season rather than partway through it, check the door still pulls itself shut from an inch open, and write the date down. Everything below is measured from that date.
- Monthly while the cooler runs Run a dry cloth along the door frame and round the edge of the opening in the evening, when the room is at its dampest. Dry metal means the cabinet is winning. A damp cloth is a reading about the air, not about the appliance.
- After a long run of open windows Dry the frame and roll the seal outward to look into the fold. A channel that stays wet for weeks is where growth starts, and the mild soap, water and baking-soda solution the care guide specifies deals with it long before a seal is a replacement job.
- Whenever the house smells of outside Look through the grille at floor level. A cooler moves unfiltered outside air through the house all day, and what it carries reaches the condenser faster in these four months than in the other eight put together.
- September, as the cooler comes off Second seal check, second look at the condenser. The cabinet has had four months of harder work, and the house is about to turn dry and heated, which is a different kind of pressure on the same rubber.
Stop here Beading still sitting on the frame a day after the cooler has been shut down, a gasket fold that will not stay dry between wipes, or an upper zone that climbed in July and has never come back to its setting: none of those belongs to the room any more. Denver Sub-Zero Repair Pros takes it from there — call (720) 790-9436, or reserve a slot.
Two follow-ups
Do I have to give the cooler up to keep the cabinet happy?
No. A wine cabinet in a swamp-cooled house is working harder, not failing, and the answer is housekeeping rather than surrender. Keep the condenser clear, keep the seal doing its job, and open the windows the cooler actually needs rather than every one in the house. If a zone still drifts, ring Denver Sub-Zero Repair Pros on (720) 790-9436.
Is summer condensation doing the cabinet any harm?
Water on the outside of a door frame does nothing much on its own. Water living in the folded channel of a gasket is another matter, because rubber left damp for weeks grows things and stiffens unevenly along its length. Dry the frame, keep the fold clean, and the season passes without leaving anything behind it.