Build Positive Walk In cold room in your basement - My experiment

[greatgardener]

Hello members,

To preserve my kitchen vegetable and store my canning, i built a cold room in my basement.

You can see my potatoes bins too.

----> My Cold storage room building pictures.

Outcome:

 

[baymule]

Awesome looking cold storage! Here in southeast Texas we don't have basements. I sure would like a basement so I could take advantage of a cooler place to store my foods.

 

[Denim Deb]

OK, I'll be looking at this closer later on. I've been wanting to do something like that for years!

 

[moolie]

We had a room like this, complete with the venting system and insulated from the rest of the basement, in our old house--it worked really well but we had to totally close off the vents at the wall opening when the outdoor temps went below -15C.

In our present house, our cold room is just an unheated basement closet with bare concrete walls that we keep closed off from the rest of the basement--works well for root veggies in buckets of damp sand (just ran out of garden carrots last month), we also keep our buckets of grain and home canned fruit there.

 

[TanksHill]

Great looking room. My garage is partially under my home. Stays somewhat cool. I built a small similar area.

 

[Marianne]

Nice!

 

[greatgardener]

Ok for Texas... but here last winter... -43 degrees.... imagine

 

[Denim Deb]

You can keep that cold! I'm glad it DOESN'T get that cold here. I'm almost to the point in my house of being able to make something for storing produce and canned goods.

 

[Britesea]

I desperately need more organization for my food storage. We have a 4 foot high crawl space under our house- it's wired for lights because apparently a former owner used it to grow pot. I'd like to do something with that, even if it's such a low ceiling.

 

[k15n1]

Nice work. The venting looks top notch. Thanks for posting the pictures. I'll have to take some pictures of the cold room I built. Mine is quite a bit smaller, unfortunately.

Sorry to be a negative Ned but I see some potential issues. If you don't mind, I'll describe them briefly. If they don't apply to you, maybe they'll be helpful to some other reader...

Root cellars are not a one-size-fits-all type storage solution. Cold storage needs fall in 2 categories: cool/dry and cold/damp. Cool/dry for jars, onions, garlic, squash, and other dry goods. Cold/damp for most vegetables, especially potatoes, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, and apples.

Looks like you're got a cold/dry hybrid. I guess you control the vents so it can be cool/dry. Or if you add moisture it'll be cold/damp. But you probably don't want jars stored in the damp. But if you don't add moisture, those potatoes will shrivel up long before spring. Also, removable shelves and containers are best practice for root cellars.

I don't mean to discourage your root-cellar efforts. I hope you'll try it out and let us know how it turned out.