Keeping the draft tower cold

I am upgrading my keg system, my old fridge finally died. I have purchased the Danby DAR440BL from walmart.com and it should arrive soon. I have been reading the many how-to articles for building your own kegerator and this seems to be a common choice for fridges. One thing that has me somewhat puzzled is the common method for cooling the draft tower that is mounted on top of the fridge. I understand why we want to do this - so the first pour is icy cold and does not foam like warm beer. What I don't understand is why we have to get so elaborate with a computer fan blowing air up into the tower. I am thinking about trying a different, much simpler technique and I am wondering if anyone has tried it.

I think we can rely on the principle of heat conduction to completely eliminate the need for a fan and avoid using any additional energy beyond the fridge. Why not just make the beer line out of stainless steel tubing? As long as there is a sufficient length or "coil" of tubing in the cold-box of the fridge it seems there should be more than enough cooling supplied by heat conduction through the metal tubing up into the tower. It would also be important to insulate or wrap the stainless tubing portion after it leaves the cold-box all the way up into the tower. What do you think, anyone tried this technique?

somebody did this by running the beer line through some copper tubing that ran from top of the tower and about a foot into the fridge (and beer lines just run inside). Not sure how it worked out but I'll look for the thread.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/pvc-tower-cooling-solution-43072/

I voted for waste of time.

I have a PVC tower and 8' of line on each keg in my Sanyo. i serve at about 8-12psi depending on style and I never have excessive foaming. The 8' coil stays in the fridge ontop of the cornies. There's only about 2.5' of line in the tower. By my calculations (3/16" ID line x 30" = 3.3117cuin = 1.8oz, or approximately 11% of my (first) pint. That "warm" beer is usually only in the first one of the night.

I would only consider doing this if the kegerator was in a hot garage or something, and the tower really was getting hot. My kegerator is inside, my tower's not chilled, and I've never once thought to myself that I wish it was.

Hmm, starting to sound like it may not be worth much trouble for me since my kegerator is inside the house. I think at a minimum I will take some copper wire and wrap it around the tower tubing and leave a coil of it inside the fridge.

If you decide to do it, go with copper. It's more conductive. I think it would work fine.

GreenwoodRover said:

I voted for waste of time.

I have a PVC tower and 8' of line on each keg in my Sanyo. i serve at about 8-12psi depending on style and I never have excessive foaming. The 8' coil stays in the fridge ontop of the cornies. ...

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Same here, except I loosely swirl my excess line around each keg.

When I installed my towers I only drilled holes big enough for the lines to go through.
So the tower is not being cooled at all. I dont have any foaming problems with the 3-4 inches of tubing that is technically "warm".

Good post. This has been one item I have been trying to decide whether or not is was worth doing with my Sanyo conversion (as well as installing an external thermostat, which I am sure I will wind up doing).

Ya but a homemade glycol system would be so much cooler

It will work, The reason I voted waste of time was because my faucet sweats even now when the room is at 65 degrees. It will work but i suggest that you try it out first, if it does not stay cold enough then give it a shot. What can happen? You save some money of you just have a cpl warm beers before going to the hardware store.

If you ran the line inside soft copper tubing you'll want a good amount of copper in the fridge and just a little in the tower. The thermal mass of the large cold copper coil will cause the small piece in the tower to get much colder.

I have a fan in my system pointed in the general area of the tower opening. My first pour of the night will have a little more foam than I would prefer but after that no issues at all.

Linc