Still cold - no heat yet

So, the heaters have been ordered but haven't arrived. It's been very cold in Portland for the last week, many days in the low 20s. Today the kids have been home from school for the 4th straight day - Jill is calling it "day 4 of the hostage crisis," and it looks like tomorrow isn't going to get any better, weather-wise.

Hopefully the heaters will arrive on Friday so that we can install them this weekend. We decided to go with electric quartz heaters - like those you see at a bus stop or at a restaurant. We quickly decided against gas or propane, even though we have gas in the building, because we'd have to run a supply pipe (somewhat expensive) and also an exhaust pipe. Since the fermentation room is a large concrete box, it's not easy to run anything of large diameter into or out of it, so running a vent (minimum 3 inches) would have been a pain. Plus we worried about the heater producing "off" odors from the burning gas. For all these reasons, we quickly abandoned the thought of using gas heat.

Thus, we knew we were going to install electric heaters, but didn't know what kind. A fan heater has a heating element and a fan that blows over it to carry the heat throughout the room. A quartz heater has no fan - instead it radiates infared heat, as well as a little light, directly onto a surface. Literally it heats just as the sun does - if you're directly in the sun you feel very warm, but the sun also warms up stuff it shines on, which radiates heat itself back into the room. The major benefit of all of this is that there is no fan, which is desirable for us. It doesn't matter so much while wine is in the barrel, but we're also going to use the heaters during primary fermentation. Since we ferment in open-top containers, we rely on the Carbon Dioxide blanket of gas that the yeast produce to protect the wine from oxidation. If we had a fan blowing in the room, it would disrupt the CO2 layer that protects the wine. Ergo, we're installing quartz heaters rather than fan heaters.

If they ever come. (Brrr)