Kegerator, but not built from a fridge or freezer?

[abernat]

I'm trying to get a display piece working for my company. We're building a kegerator into a competitor's piece of equipment. That means ... no obvious cooling unit.

The box is 2' wide, 3' deep, 6' tall, and made of 2" foam insulation. I currently have it cooled with a hacked up mini fridge; the compressor is sitting on top and the cold plate dangles inside. It gets down to 50-55 degrees, but that's just not good enough.

So, what are my options? I've looked at:

1) Marine refrigeration unit; 12v powered and not powerful enough without water cooling.
2) Wine cooler, but they only get down to 55* (I'd have to hack it) and are expensive.
3) Get another dorm fridge and carve it up too... not preferred but I'm kind of out of ideas.

 

[MrFoodScientist]

How often is your compressor running and how is it controlled?

 

[brew_ny]

without pictures in didn't happen

 

[abernat]

Pics coming soon...

The compressor is controlled by an aquarium controller (the standard one people use). It's set for whatever 40F is in Celsius and never gets there, so the compressor never stops. It's just underpowered for the space - went from a minifridge to probably 20x the volume.

 

[MrFoodScientist]

Where's the probe sitting and do you have air movement? With a 6' tall box, cooling unit on top and no air movement, you're going to have stratification. If your probe is near the top, it won't sense much cooling for quite some time.

If you were closer, I'd give you this and you could tear the guts out of it.

Also, are you trying to cool it empty or with warm kegs? Fill it with already chilled kegs and see what that does. My mini fridge kegerator will run for hours on end to chill just one warm keg and warms up fairly quickly when it's empty.

Are your air gaps sealed up nicely? Have you considered adding another layer of insulation? If you had some way of keeping the inside rigid (like building an inner cabinet of some kind), I think you'd get better insulation out of the same thickness of fiberglass insulation.

Out of curiosity, (which will probably be satisfied with pics) what kind of equipment is this?