Hose Length and CO2 Distributors

If I'm going to use a double CO2 distributor in my new kegerator, will I need 6 feet of hose from the CO2 Tank to the distributor and then another 6 feet from the distributor to the kegs?

or...

Should I get two sections of 3 foot long tubing and use 3 feet of tubing from the tank to the distributor and 3 feet of tubing from the distributor to the kegs?

Glad I thought this through before I pushed the BUY button at NB.com!

That depends. Is the CO2 tank going to be in the kegerator? How big of a kegerator is it? Do you have the "arm" room to turn off the distributor if you mounted it close by and how difficult will it be to change out the tanks when the CO2 is drained? I personally would like to have them all close together, but with a 4912M kegerator, it's tight in there so I just used a Y splitter coming off the regulator with shut off valves. True, I can only pressurize two kegs at the same the same pressure, but I can turn one off when changing out.

I've got the 4912 as well. The tank is in the fridge now, but once I make the full tap conversion, I'm thinking of having it outside.

The length of the CO2 line does not matter, so long as they aren't too short to be easy to work with.

david_42 said:

The length of the CO2 line does not matter, so long as they aren't too short to be easy to work with.

Click to expand...

Thanks!

My wife said the length of the hose doesn't matter either, but I don't think she was talking about my kegerator!

It's not length, it's DIAMETER!!!
On my setup, I got about 5 feet of CO2 line for each keg coming off of the Y splitter. I find that amount gives me plenty of room to take a CO2 line out to hook up or pressurize other kegs for storage, testing, aging etc. etc. There is enough room behind the regulator and the kegs themselves to store them. I too had thought about running the CO2 out, however, there is simply not enough room to run two or more CO2 lines out through the drip hole inside. One probably, but that would be about it. You would then have to mount the distributor somewhere inside the 4912 with enough strength to be able to turn off some of the valves when you need to. That really scared me from all the reading on destroying that refrigerator for fear of the coolant and heat exchanger lines running all over that thing. A lot of people have ruined theirs from doing that. I'm curious, why are you going to go with a distributor when it can only hold two kegs, corny size????
The Y with the splitter had worked very well for me and I use a cobra tap. You can still have the tank inside with a full tap conversion. You'll have to work on other things too like keeping the tap cold.

If you store the CO2 inside the fridge, do you have to change anything to account for the colder temperature of the gas?

They just drop a couple of psi or so. No big issue with that.

If you are worried about balancing the keg system don't. That is only needed on the beer line side, not the gas side.