Occasionally, we here at Wine Oh TV get wine gadgets and wine gifts for review. This time the folks over at The Elertus asked us to test out their wine protection system. Sadly, I don’t have a wine cellar, unless you count the crawl space under my house. So, I enlisted the help of fellow Wine Oh’s Deb Robbins and Peter Arzhintar to try out the wine protection system in their fabulous and full, BRAND NEW and LARGE wine cellar. What do you mean you detect jealousy in my text? I’m perfectly happy crawling on all fours to retrieve my precious vino. Sure, it’s really dark and scary under the house and there are a lot of cobwebs and I’m allergic to dust and I have a bad back oh and my knees aren’t that great either and I had to walk to school in the snow up hill both ways (oh wait that’s my mom’s tragic tale).
All kidding aside, Deb and Peter were nice enough to test the wine gadget out over the past few months and here are their thoughts on the pros and cons of the The Elertus Wine Protection System:
The Elertus wine protection system sensor monitors temperature, humidity, movement light, and more for any storage area. We have a moderate collection of wine in a small cellar and use the Elertus sensor to monitor the room. The sensor will alert you by email or text message when it is too hot or cold, the door is open, the light is turned on, and more. The sensor is only a little larger than a deck of cards and will cost you around $200 online.
PROS
- Elertus is easily configured from your computer over WiFI. Most sensors work right out of the box and have worked flawlessly so far.
- Our cellar doesn’t report humidity, the Elertus censor notified us that it was outside of our preset range and allowed us to immediately make changes.
- Elertus has simple iPhone and Android apps that you can download. You can configure which alerts you want to notify you by email or text message to one email address and one phone number. You can also open the app or visit your control center on the web to check the status of your storage at any time.
- If you’re worried that you might leave the door to your wine cabinet open, that it might go on the fritz while you’re away, or just want to be sure your wine is stored under proper conditions, the Elertus sensor will bring some peace of mind!
CONS
- Unfortunately, we couldn’t install the door sensor in our cellar. It’s a small sensor that works fine for a free-standing wine cellar. Installing the sensor on our door would have required adding a shim to the door for the sensor to line up properly. The cord for the door sensor is only a few feet long, making Elertus better suited for wine cabinets than for larger cellars.
- Only allows for one email address and one phone number. We briefly touched on this above, but what if we both want to get an email when it sends an alert? Right now we’re using a throw-away shared email address.
What We Would Love to See
- I would have liked to see a feature that didn’t tell me the lights are on and off or the door is open and closed. I would have much rather had a feature that only alerted me when the lights were left on for more than X minutes or the door is open for more than X minutes. This would result in fewer notifications but make them actionable.
- There is a lot more they could do with the data beyond just sending you an alert when it gets too hot or when the door is opened: giving a graph of your temperature and humidity so you know how stable it is, letting you know that you are letting light in for X hours a day, sending you a text that you’ve left the door open so you can close it before the temp alert goes off.
