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Root cellars in hot climates?

 
Posts: 35
Location: Australia
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Hi folks,

I live in a warm climate (Australia) where summers are hot (humid in early summer and dry in late summer), autumn and spring are warmish and wet, and winter is rainy and mild with no snow and rarely a frost. It doesn't get below freezing.

I'm just wondering if it would be possible/worthwhile to build a root cellar here? I would mainly use it to store autumn harvests like potato, pumpkin and late fruits (like apples and pears that don't store well in refrigeration) through the winter. I know apples and potatoes don't store well together, but before I worry about things like that, I really want to find out if the cellar idea can be done successfully here, or if I would be better served just forgetting about this idea and spending my time trying to sort out a solar dehydrator instead.

Cheers!
 
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Hey Marie.
I have made little root cellars in the desert just in deep sand and shade. Not perfect but helps a ton to keep stuff cool.
lots of cellars have a vent to the outside and that helps with the temp. The vent is normally opened cooler parts of the year. Its harder to do when its warm all day but opening it at night when its cool can work. Burring in dirt for helping with its cool temps and for its insulation values. That and venting at the right times can make it work great. Otherwise If you use city water. You can make a heat exchanger in your cellar to cool it when you run the water. Other wise solar dehydrator are great.
Hope that helps a bit let me know if you need more help.
 
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Hi All.  Im in Zambia where our average temps vary from about 5 degrees celsius in winter to about 40 degrees celsius in summer.  Would anybody know what the temperature range in a root cellar would be with these outside temperatures?  Im looking for about 10 to 13 degrees centigrade.  How deep should i go to achieve those temperatures?
 
pollinator
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Hi Emmie,

Short answer:  you are not likely to get to 10C unless you go very deep.  You may have to use some evaporative cooling if you really need to be below 13C.  The good news is after about 2 meters, using sand as an insulator you will easily get to 18C, maybe even 13C

Longer answer:

What is the temperature of the water in a well at 30 meters?  This is about as cool as you can get a root cellar.  The good news is the temp variation between seasons is less than you might think.  Even at 40C in summer half a meter of sand above the top of your cellar and the surface will eliminate daily temperature cycles to about a degree.  

If the well water at 30 meters is 10 C  The earth and a good low thermal exchange material, like sand, will keep it at near 10C.  If is not then there are a few things one can do to use evaporative cooling to reduce the temp, but I believe you won't have to go to that measure.  

At 30 meters studies have shown that temps are stable year round.  That equilibrium is most effected by ground water temperature.  Find out water water is at 30 meters and start there.  

If you can try this:  Take a thermometer and place it in a metal box/tin.  Dig a small pit to 2 meters that will hold the small box.  Bury it.  on top of the back fill place half a meter of sand.  Shade would be a good idea as well.  Leave it for a week.  When you dig it up and open it, you will have a good estimate.  6 feet or 2 meters is a good guess as to how deep one would need to go to get cool temperatures.  Going much below 2 meters is not going to reduce the temperature by more than a few degrees.  

 
Emmie Komninos
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Thank you!  I will do the test and let you know.  I can also drop the thermometer into our borehole to around 30m to test.  
 
pollinator
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Location: Wichita, Kansas, United States
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One thing to keep in mind is - those ground temperatures are based on the average ambient air temperature over the last century or two.
So, the warmer the climate and the warmer those average ambient temperatures are, the warmer those ground temps will be.
 
Posts: 281
Location: rural West Virginia
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I live in West Virginia, zone 6, not a really hot climate but it gets to 100 degrees sometimes in summer and winters are variable but can go below zero F. We have a root cellar which works pretty well. It works pretty well because: It's in the right place, quite close to the house but dug into a hillside south of the house, so its entrance faces north; there are trees all around it so it's in shade in summer; I don't use it much in summer but I want to put potatoes in there as early as July. I find they do fine in the cool dark, despite it being about 70 degrees, a good 30 degrees higher than ideal. Come October, when I may have other things--apples, pears, cabbage--I want to store in there, I begin hauling my buckets of potatoes into my attached greenhouse (the nearest part of my house) overnight on chilly nights so I can leave the door of the root cellar open, which slowly drops the temps in there (if I left the potatoes in there, mice would go for them).
I made a choice which likely makes it warmer in summer--rather than create a concrete roof topped with dirt, we did something typical of this area--built a garden shed atop the root cellar. I had plans to put a vent in the door and one in the floor of the garden shed to control ventilation and reduce humidity but never got around to it--and it is extremely humid in there, but root  cellars are supposed to be humid. My potatoes keep beautifully in this cellar--I haven't stored apples and pears there much because the squirrels keep stealing them, but that's another problem.
 
pollinator
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Location: North FL, in the high sandhills
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One other thing to consider on underground storage:

Here in the southeast USA in the past many crops were stored below ground in cellars.
Some like sweet potatoes were even done above ground in piles.

That all came to an end in the 1960s, when the fire ant invasion began.

Those ants will destroy anything and everything in the ground and make it an unpleasant experience to access anything near anywhere they have nested.

One possibly helpful thing I've noticed is if you need them out of something like containers you grow veggies in you can convince them to move elsewhere by thoroughly stirring up their nest three or four days in a row.

I've always viewed them as karma for some of the things we in the USA did to the South American countries where they came from but at least that's a small workaround to disturb those ants until they move elsewhere.
 
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