Energy Consumption of The Wine Well Chiller

When Idling (nothing being chilled), the Wine Well Chiller uses the same amount of electricity as a 100 watt incandescent llight bulb! That's right - 100 watts per hour, probably making it the greenest commercial refridgerator on the planet.  Running full time for a year, the chiller will use 876 kilowatt hours in idling mode, costing $219 here in Connecticut, where electricity costs about $0.25/kwh - the highest in the nation.

In most states the electricity rate is less than half the Connecticut rate, so the annual power cost is about $100.  And that number can be halved again by turning off the chiller at night.  In the morning, it takes only 20 minutes to reach  its chilling temperature again.

But what is the cost of chilling the wine? A 750ml bottle of wine weighs about 3 pounds.  In 6 minutes the chiller will reduce the temperature of that wine by 20 degrees Farrenheight.  So about 60 BTU (British Thermal Units) are required to do the chilling.  Well double that number to account for mechanical losses, making it 120 BTU, which is directly convertible to kilowatt hours.  The answer is 0.035 KWH, costing (in Connecticut) a little less than one cent.  Call it a penny per bottleor $10 per 1,000 bottles - not a very serious expense for sending 1,000 happy customers home with exactly the wine they wanted, chilled.

An air cooler, regardless of the number of doors, cannot even come close to the chillers energy efficieny.  Besides costing several times the chillers cost to operate, it takes 2.5 hours to chill a bottle of wine, occupies a major chunk of floor space and, unless it has 15 or 20 doors, it cannot satisfy every customers choice of chilled wine.  Also, it would be UNTHINKABLE to turn a cooler off at night.  Not a difficult choice at all.