Kegerator Door Shelves?

How does everybody handle the door shelves on their kegerator doors? Do you just cut the shelves off, or remove the whole inside of the door?

If you remove the whole inside door piece, do you leave the insulation exposed, or cover it with a wood or plastic piece?

The shelves in my fridge are messed up anyway, plus they are in the way, so they have to go, one way or another. I am going to pull the doors off to move it upstairs anyway, so I figure I might as well pull the whole inside panel off while I have the door off.

On my first kegger, I removed the panel and replaced it with a sheet of water-proof hardboard.

It is easy to remove the entire panel. Mine looked ugly when I was done, so I glued another piece of styrofoam over it.

I just did mine this week. I decided to cut the entire panel off, so I wouldn't have to mess with the seal since it's an older refrigerator. I was planning on just letting the insulation exposed, but I discovered that was insulated with fiberglass insulation as opposed to a hard foam insulation.

I pulled the old insulation out and bought a 2x8 sheet of 2" extruded polystyrene insulation and glued that in the door. It's probably insulated better now! I can post some pictures when I get home, if you're interested.

At some point I may put some kind of panel over the insulation, because taking the original shelf panel off causes the door to loose quite a bit of rigidity, and I had some trouble with it not sealing correctly in the bottom corner. I remedied this with a stack of rare earth magnets that I had sitting around.

I found out the hard way when you take the shelves out the gap between the door jam and the door seal shrank, so my door didn’t seal up any more also the shelves added some strength to the door it self. I ended up having to buy a gate lock to hold the door shut. My solution is cut the plastic shelves out leaving the plastic between the seal and door jam and buy some insulated board the stuff you see the guys using to build the fermentation cabinets and glue it in.

Good luck