The Kegerator, Part II

Continuing building the kegerator...

So, the most obvious problem first. I'm building a kegerator out of a chest freezer. Won't the beer freeze? To prevent that we need to make sure the temperature in the kegerator stays above the freezing point (of beer, if not water). For most freezers, the built-in thermostat will be well under that even on the warmest setting. So we need to bypass the chest freezer thermostat. We do that by taking control of the freezer operation away from the built-in temperature sensor and compressor.

This device is a Johnson Controls A419ABC-1 120V temperature controller. Basically what it does is takes a voltage in from the house, and passes it through to the freezer if the temperature is above a certain point (measured with the sensor). In the above picture, you can see the input line (left orange cord), output line (right orange cord) and sensor line (gray cord). That's all well and good but there's 1 small problem. I saved money by ordering this off of ebay, and it didn't come like that above picture. It came not wired up. I have to do electronics. Yay!

Fortunately, the A419 is a sort-of common thermostat among the kegerator building crowd, and there are resources online to figure out what you're doing (see this article called How to wire a Fridge Controller 101 or check out the manual for the device). Basically, if you know how to do wiring, you should be good. For me, I haven't done much of anything with wiring since high school, so I had to re-learn how to identify which color matched which in a 3-wire 120V cord, and how to read a wiring diagram. This picture is after the sensor is wired in and I'm starting to wire up the power.

After wiring the thermostat, jostling it around during later construction, and re-wiring it later for reliability, it's done and I can move on.

Now, we've set up the collar and attached it, wired up the freezer so it can maintain a constant, usable temperature, we need to install the gas works. Relative to the rest of the build-out, this part goes by very quickly. First things first, we drill out holes in the collar for the tap shanks (those are the bolt-looking tubes that go carry the liquid to the taps. I ran to the store and picked up a new 7/8" drill bit for this (you want it to be pretty tight so the cooling stays inside). Then, on to the shanks you screw on the taps and handles. Now you have shiny black and chrome beer dispensers that aren't yet hooked up to anything. But they do look nice, don't they...

Erica and I made a batch of Root Beer to try out the kegerator. For a 5-gallon batch we ended up with the following:
6.5T (2oz) of Root Beer Concentrate
10 cups sugar (we actually used 6 cups sugar, 4 cups store-brand splenda to make it lower cal)
5 gallons water

Boil one or two gallons of the water, remove it from heat and stir in the root beer concentrate and sugar. Return it to the heat and boil/simmer. Cool to room temperature and transfer to keg, topping up to 5 gallons.

Now that we have something to try out, we fill the CO2 tank (at the local homebrew store, Mountain Homebrew) and begin attaching the hoses.

The CO2 regulator attaches directly to the tank. The kegging equipment I'm using came from http://www.kegconnection.com/ which nicely already attached some of the lines for me. The CO2 is sent (via the red hoses) from the regulator to the CO2 splitter, which attaches via a ball-lock to the 5-gallon cornelius kegs. The clear plastic hoses are high-pressure beer lines that feed the beer to the taps.

As you can see, this is still a pretty hacky setup. I need to properly mount the gas splitter and the hoses are all tangled, but it's in workable condition for now. Turn up the pressure to the kegs with a standard flathead screwdriver, and the root beer is pressurizing!

The kegerator is mostly done...