Homemade distribution manifold

I've been thinking about moving from bottling to kegging, and with the purchase of a brand spankin' new fridge I get the old fridge for use as keg central.

That said, I am in the R&D process as far as putting a system together. Since I want to have several kegs hooked up I have been looking at various distribution manifolds for the system. The ones I have seen are homemade are the typical brass fittings screwed together. Has anyone made one out of copper pipe and soldered the pieces together? Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I would like to see a picture of how one of those look and work as compared to their brass brethren. I have a lot of spare copper and fittings from past projects so therein lies the reason for the copper option.

Personally I wouldnt trust copper pipe soldered at 30psi or possibly more.

OMJ said:

Personally I wouldnt trust copper pipe soldered at 30psi or possibly more.

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Minimum household water pressure is 40psi, I think mine is 55 or so and virtually all of my plumbing is soldered copper. Above 80-85psi you have to have a regulator to lower the water pressure. If soldered copper can handle 80psi water I'm sure it can handle co2 at typical homebrew pressures.

My old man uses copper tubing for the air lines in his shop. I'm not advocating it, but he's successfully fed 120psi air through the system for 8+ years without issue. So long as you are regulating the pressure out of C02 tank to something that you could serve beer at, you should be fine.

camiller said:

Minimum household water pressure is 40psi, I think mine is 55 or so and virtually all of my plumbing is soldered copper. Above 80-85psi you have to have a regulator to lower the water pressure. If soldered copper can handle 80psi water I'm sure it can handle co2 at typical homebrew pressures.

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good point didnt even think about that

Properly soldered copper can handle 100s of psi. Higher the tempurature the lower the psi rating. The down side of using copper with co2 would be carbonic acid and acidity eating away the solder and copper slowly. It would probably take forever (ok maybe a few years) for it to eat away. It would handle homebrew Co2 pressures fine as long as it is after the regulator.