Major Kegger Issue

[jlammers]

Long story short, i made my bar to a specific size with the intent having my kegerator in a different room. Set up the bar for the tower to come out of the top of the bar with the beer line running to the kegerator, 35 feet way. Major, major major error. I have finished the bar and hooked up the kegerator and get nothing but foam. As i continue to research I am finding that I may have built myself a very expensive foam maker. I never thought that it was that imperative to keep the beer line as cold as the kegerator. I just assumed I would waste on length of beer each time I used the keg, which is actually not that often.

so now I have 36 feet of beer line running from one end of the room to the other, in the ceiling and behind a wall up into my bar tower. Anyone have any recommendations at all about how to rectify this issue? Or am I hosed.

[insul8to]

Scott, there is a solution to your problem… You need to rerun your beer lines in a tube with forced cold air. It may get pricey. There are a couple links below with more information. Micromatic sells all the equipment you need. Hope this helps…

http://www.kegkits.com/remote_keg.htm
http://www.micromatic.com/draft-keg-bee … d-130.html

[jojo42_0]

I know I’m a bit late to this party, but I am almost positive a forced air system is not going to work due to the length involved (length is doubled if you’re using a circuit, which is the only real way to run a remote line of any material length). The problem is that with that much length, you’d need a commercial blower (especially since it sounds like it’s not a straight shot either), and a commercial blower is going to create more heat in your keg box than you want/can deal with. Take a look at the following posts, as I think they have some good links in them, and the author seemed pretty smart (okay, you caught me, I was the author, but in my defense, I usually agree with whatever I say):

Post 1: chest freezer ???

neoexodus wrote:

Bryan, from what I’ve read, 12-15 feet is an awfully long distance to cool, especially if it is 12-15 feet each way, making the total circuit (using the diagram below) a minimum of 24-30 feet. Additionally, I am not certain that the circuit will be the best method, as it will allow air to circulate around the beer lines all the way to the tower (good, if it works), but probably not up the tower to the tap, at least not with the same efficiency (bad, as this will cause a warm spot in the line).

This is the same advice as in the post in the General Questions area: Where to put Chest Freezer? topic. In that post, I put a number of links that state that short of using a glycol system, a consumer blower is not going to have the power to move that much volume, and a commercial pump is going to run too warm for the refrigeration to compensate. I am not sure if the fact that you intend to use a chest freezer (converted I assume, as freezing the beer will not help either) has any bearing on this, but I think that it is still going to be too long. Is there any way to get the chest freezer closer to the bar.

According to the article, it looks like 5 feet is really the maximum of what you want to go for, and though I assume that there is some play in that figure, I don’t think that going 3 times that is going to work out so well.

EDIT- I just realized that your post came prior to my initial reply, but will leave this here in case anyone else needs to reference it.

Post 2: where to put chest freezer??

neoexodus wrote:

Based on the articles I’ve seen, 12-15 sounds like it’s too long, but I have no practical experience to back that up. The only article I have that is handy is the following that I found on Micromatic’s site:

Micromatic Remote Dispensing Article

After re-reading it a bit, it is saying that it is limited to 5′ due to the residential grade blowers (it’ll make sense in a minute), so it may be leaving off that larger blowers would do the job… I would lean towards no, however. Although I know almost nothing about it, I believe that commercial bars can use a glycol system (or perhaps something that sounds similar to that, it’s been a while since I ran across that info), but I’m quite sure that that is cost prohibitive to most of us.

Hope the info helps, even if it isn’t what you were hoping for.

-Jeff

EDIT: After actually reading more than a few scattered words on the page, I see that it does make a statement about industrial blowers, and that a fridge is not going to be able to handle the heat generated by these larger applications.

EDIT 2: Glycol Based System Article:
Glycol Based System Article

Probably not what you were hoping for, but hopefully it helps. Is there any way to bring the keg box closer, it may not be pretty, but at least it would be usable.

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