For what purpose exactly?
Sounds like you are looking for an off the shelf method to stop your taps from working when your business is closed. Instead of controlling gas I would put valves with actuators on the beer lines to stop flow. By shutting off the gas side you would still have pressure on the kegs and would be able to get several pours using the pressure already in the keg as well as the pressure from the dissolved CO2. Hooking these valves to the beer side wired to something like a raspberry pi or andruino where you can program your schedule. Otherwise you could go with valves that open and close depending on if they have power going to them and just wire them up to a timer like the one you would use on a lamp while you are on vacation or a pool pump.
Otherwise tap locks arent too bad of a solution if you only have a couple taps and this is for home use and dont mind a more manual approach
checked out the rasberry pi and adruino...not really my area of expertise.
So you have a nitro tank and a co2 tank. You might run a line through a valve, easily accessible, for each one then to the kegs. Just turn them off when you want the gas off. Then the only place for a leak is between the valve and the gas tanks.
Not automated, but pretty easy.
You probably want to go for some sort of "electric beverage valve" (good google terms) that can be opened or closed by turning on or off power to it.
For what it's worth I tried using valves in my beer lines to shut off the taps. The valves worked in shutting off the beer flow but caused so much turbulence that I got way too much foam as a result. So shutting off the gas flow would be better in my opinion but as others have mentioned you can still get some beer from the taps until the pressure is relieved.
I was using an Arduino to control a relay for the valves. There may be other valves the don't cause the turbulence problem but I didn't look for any others. I just gave up on the concept.
Pretty sure the Kegbot uses solenoid valves. And I doubt they would use foamers. Maybe check out their site to see what valves they are using...
Cheers!
Normally closed motorized ball valves would do the trick on the liquid (or gas) side with out foam or turbulence issues.
easy enough, but leaks where not really the main issue. I get about two leaks a year so not bad.
I should clarify, I have a few bad leaks a year, but regular difficult-to-find leaks. Its tough, im serving 11 kegs all the time and the inventory is up to about 70 kegs now. So, i wouldn't really call an auto co2 valve an extreme.
Get a light timer and 120V solenoid valves on the the gas lines.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-4-Plastic...hash=item46385a0d6c:m:mvpoU7Gs2BtLX774a2PdAVA
This is by far the easiest and cheapest solution.
This time a year Christmas light timers are on sale everywhere; get a fairly decent one that you can set your run time hours on instead of the dusk to dawn ones. Plug a cheap power strip into it just like you would Christmas lights. Install solenoids on each cylinder and run a cheap extension cord to the controller. You are looking at <$50 for the entire project and very little work to install.
Well, I would. Consider the fact that you have leaks while the system is on, and it's on for what, 12 hours or more a day? So now you turn it off for 12 hours but still lose all the pressurized co2 that's still in the kegs. How much are you really saving?
Are your hoses and manifolds leaking? Or are the kegs leaking?
You could try something like this, http://www.micromatic.com/detectors-and-analyzers/bypass-co2-leak-detector-mm-blip.
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