beverage lines

I'm new to this so forgive my incompetence...I just got a two faucet tower on ebay. It has four 5/16 lines coming out of it...two for the glycol in/out (I plan to circulate cold water from the fridge with an aquarium pump to keep the lines cold) and two lines for the taps....I just bought 20 ft of 3/16 beverage line...Is it ok to run 3/16 from the kegs and connect to the last 5 feet of 5/16? If so, what is the connecter called and where do I order it? Also, will running 3/16 into 5/16 cause foaming or any other problems..thanks

No reason to post in two spots.

Can you change the beer lines? It's going to screw with your balancing of you try to merge them. You're going to have to do some trial and error instead of relying on the math

sorry about the double post... can I just run 5/16 line all the way to the kegs?

You can, but you would need a lot of line for it to balance. The beverage tubing has a specific pressure drop rating/ft. of tubing and for most of us we have short runs and short verticle distances to our taps. Thus we want a fairly high pressure drop/ft. of line. You need the 3/16" tubing to do it properly. Save yourself a huge headache and replace the line with 3/16" (just my $0.02)

Replacing the lines is probably good advice...however, in my excitement I installed the tower to my bar and insulated about 5 ft of line threw a wall and mounted it threw a hole in the fridge. I look in the top of the tower and its packed with hardned foam insulation. It would be a job to tear everything out. If I went ahead and tried the 3/16 to 5/16 thing about how much 3/16 line do you think I'd need inside the fridge? What do you think the chances of a novice being able to get the lines balanced would be?

The real problem is going to be with the fitting used to connect the 5/16" to the 3/16" beverage line. I'm not sure you will find a 5/16" x 3/16" barb reducer, but if you do find it, the fitting will create a restriction. The restriction will cause a large pressure drop over a very short distance, the CO2 will drop out of solution and you will serve foam.

The reason the tower you bought has 5/16" beverage line is the same reason that it is glycol cooled, the tower was installed some distance from the chilled kegs.

When you have very long runs you must use larger diameter tubing. The long run will reduce the pressure to keep the beer from foaming up and the large diameter allows for a proper pour speed.

John

i say it is better to fix this now, rather than deal with headache after headache. yes, it will take time to do it right now, but once you are done, you won't have to mess with it.

also, how long will the lines be total? if they are going to be more than 6-7 ft, you actually may need to move to 1/4'' line due to the length and require pressure to serve, unless you want to push your beer a little warmer or at a higher carbonation rate (warmer will require a higher psi for the right volumes of co2, which will allow the system to be balanced with the longer than average length of 3/16'' that you would have, and if you didn't mind a beer that was a bit more carbonated than you are used to, that could be a way to work with that as well)

i would recommend replacing the tubing regardless just for the fact that you don't know how old it is, what beers or other liquids they pushed through it, and don't know the integrity of it. it is the same reason that i replace gaskets and poppets (sometimes) and do a soak with warm pbw for all the new kegs that i purchase before i use them, even if they were from another homebrewer. i just don't know what was inside before, and would rather not find out with off flavors with my own beers.

Thanks...I'll replace the lines...