cellar temperature control devices?

Put a tank of glycol in a chest freezer then run copper lines into the room with a thermostatically controlled pump for the glycol.

Edit: freezer would need to be outside the room, of course.

 

leedorham's solution (or something similar) is probably your best bet. Any method of cooling a space requires heating some other space (hurray thermodynamics) and so every method will "require" window ventilation if you don't want to heat the rest of your apartment. The other solution is to put a fridge in the closet, or something similar (partition the closet, one side is the "hot" side, the other the "cool" side, and you move heat from the cool to the hot).

 

Place the beer next to your cold cold heart.

 

Do you have a dryer in the apartment anywhere near this closet?

 

Correct, if you cut a hole in the door and stuck a window unit in there that was venting into your apartment, that would work. I think there might be units designed for this that don't vent out quite as much heat. Also, if you do go that route, you'll probably want to insulate the closet with some blocks of foam or something, otherwise the cool air will bleed out really fast and you'll spend way more time heating than you need to.

You can't cool a closed system, a fan with water attached would actually make a room hotter because you're bringing energy in without taking any out. But it would depend a lot on exactly what's going on there. A fan that sprays water seems like it's using the same principle as sweating, that evaporating water takes some energy from the surface it's evaporating off of in order to complete the phase transition, and thus cools it. But now you have water vapor with some energy in the air, so the total energy in the room is conserved. I guess you could keep beer somewhat cool that way, but it's far from the best way to do this.

 

Cheapest solution - current fridge. Less food more beer.
Next cheapest - find a friend nearby who you can trust who has a house with a basement. And if it's in walking distance, it's really the cheapest.
Next best - a small fridge. Picked up a small apartment fridge for $350 in NY last year. Has room for a little over 3 cs. and it has a small freezer as well.
If you don't like any of those - don't try to cellar anything during the summer. Stick to fall, winter & spring.

 

If you use the basement where the dryer is, you can vent a portable a/c unit out the same hole as the dryer.

use one of these:

 

Life is full of choices

 

Basement might accomodomate a chest freezer w/ temp controller though (it's easy to throw a padlock on it if you're concerned about the shared space)? That really is the best bet for moderately sized cellars / places where you can't build out. If you do decide to go the portable A/C route you absolutely must insulate the closet or your efficiency will be abysmal.

I just moved from a place in New England with a basement space that I built out and insulated (hello, whoever moved in there! Hope you like the prebuilt cellar!) to Denver, with nothing, so I just got space in a wine storage facility. Those seem to be few and far between back East though.

Re getting a chest freezer, it's pretty easy to find them cheap on Craigslist/etc. You can rent a pickup from Home Depot to get it and ply your friends with beer to help move it in / have it fall on them / be trapped in it forever / etc.

 

Well, how long are you going to be in this situation? Is it temporary till you find a better-paying job or what?

I'm sort of in a similar situation with a rental, but just about my entire cellar is in someone else's basement, so it isn't much of an issue. Said basement is basically storage space with carpeting, they seriously don't use it for anything else and therefore don't care if I take up one or two cabinets. If was in your boat long-term but with a job I would honestly just look for a wine storage rental facility. Unless you have a good friend with a house nearby that is the only option.

Unless you can legitimately keep the air set at 60-65F 24/7 and the apartment has good insulation.

 

Do you ever buy bottled water? Because one option is to buy cold water bottles and store them next to the beer....not ideal, and would work better if you kept them in an enclosed space (like a chest, box, cabinet, whatever). But better than nothing. You would have to make sure to rotate the water pretty frequently. Obviously, if you aren't already buying bottled water then this would eventually add up to a considerable additional expense.

I only mention it because most of my beers in the aforementioned basement happen to be in a cabinet, and a few times I have put beer straight from the fridge into the cabinet. I am often amazed by how much colder all of the beer feels the next day or even two days later when I pull something else out. If I was regularly putting a few bottles of water in there, say once or twice a week, or if I was regularly buying beer from the store and putting it in the cabinet as soon as I got home, I think the yearly average temperature of the beers in there would drop by about five to ten degrees.