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Hello…
We’ll I have built my bar and it looks great….but as commonly posted, can’t get the keg box cold enough…I have a haier 2.7 ,……freezer plate has frost and a used a temp gun and measured that the frost plate at 27…fridge is brand new but doesn’t have exposed coils. I used pro pink insulation around box with great stuff….bottom has 3 inches of pro pink. I have a small desk fan blowing on the back to keep compressor cool and I have a PC fan in the keg box to circulate…door was done according to plans and I used window latches to seal it shut….coldest I got down to was 41……not sure what I did wrong but I am running out of ideas and don’t want to rip out fridge and destroy what I have done thus far .air flow around outside fridge..or lack thereof..is only issue I can think of as it is enclosed and not a lot of room around it. Can also add more fans but don’t want to keep throwing money away as it seems others got it much folder with less.. Today I added more insulation inside bit didn’t help…moved fans around …didn’t work….please help a noob
where and how are you measuring your temp?
hopefully not with the door open using the raytek.I suggest a wired digital thermometer. I just fired up my 10 year old keg box the other day and it went from 68F to 34F within 2 or 3 hours.
If you have frost, that is key, now you have to move more air. It will also take some time and of course, keep the door shut.
I think the key here is in this statement:
“doesn’t have exposed coils. I used pro pink insulation around box”Basic refrigerator theory: Cold plate inside the fridge extracts or ‘compresses’ the heat. That heat needs to go somewhere to be dissipated to help heat the room – that somewhere is the coils. In your fridge, the hot coils are just under the skin of the fridge. It is much cheaper to manufacture this way. If you take a look at the pictures from this thread Mini Fridge Disassembly you will notice the coils.
What you did by putting the insulation over the coils is you did not give the heat anywhere to go. In fact, the insulation you enclosed it in is likely better than the insulation in the fridge – this means the heat from the coils is more likely to enter the keg box than escape it. You are cooling and warming the box at the same time!
sbone is right…but hopefully you did not surround the fridge with pro pink because that is not how the plans show it. You insulate the keg box and up to the front face of the fridge. a good seam of spray foam is all that is needed, but certainly not the whole body of the fridge.
The fact that you have frost on the freezer plate is a good sign though.
Take some ray tek readings on the outside surface of your fridge unit. I would expect it to be considerably higher than ambient. If so, that’s the heat you want to get rid of.
It looks like in these newer units, they place the coils right against the outer metal skin and use that as the heat sink. Great link & photos!
happy to hear you got it sorted out. The new compact FREEZER units are said to work even better. Haven’t tried one yet myself. Cheers!
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