Low ceiling racking solution?

[Jesse17]

I'm going to install a heavy duty shelf in my mud room to store my primary ale pail, as well as several secondary carboys. It's temp controlled year around and only a few feet from my kitchen counter so it's the ideal spot for me. Of course, in my ever snowballing ideas, I figured if the carboys are going to be on a high shelf, why stir the sediment up by carrying them to the kitchen to bottle, or rather to rack to the bottling bucket? Why not just rack them before moving them.

My problem is that while the shelf only needs to be about 24" below the ceiling in order to fit 5 or 6 gal. buckets/carboys and air locks. Which would work very well in that room. I would need the shelf to be about 42" below the ceiling in order to get the auto-siphon into the carboy. Which does not work well at all for me.

Worse case scenario, I'll go with 24" of clearance, carry the carboys to the kitchen and wait 24 hours to rack. But I was hoping there is some sort of solution that would allow me to rack from a carboy on a shelf that only has about 4" or 5" clearance above the carboy.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[mongoose33]

When I crash my beer in the refrigerator, it's sitting about 5 inches off the floor. I have to pull that fermenter out of there and set it up on a table so I can drain it (I have a spigot) into my keg.

Here's one solution: You can keep your fermenters on the 24" shelf, and drain them directly using a spigot instead of autosiphon.

If your carboys are glass, that won't work, but if you can drill holes in them, add a spigot. I'm sure your LHBS sells 'em.

I have 5 plastic fermenters, all have spigots. I wouldn't go back to an autosiphon.