Planned Keezer build. Suitable Chill Water source? 5 cu/ft or 7 cu/ft?

[BeerBanana]

Hey Everyone,

I am thinking of building a keezer. I love brewing but I hate collecting, cleaning and filling bottles (and my so-far patient wife is kind of sick of seeing bottles around the house everywhere). Although, I would like to be able to bottle some of a batch so I can give to friends etc.

I want to be able to tap at least 2-3 kegs at once, and importantly, I want to be able to use the keezer as a chill water source for my fermenter. The kegs could be small 9 or 12 litre kegs possibly, I'd be fine with that.

I splashed out last year and got a 7 gal chronical fermenter with FTSS system. I love the FTSS, amazing product, but found that a) adding ice to a cooler for weeks on end got really annoying, and b) I simply didn't have enough ice to keep filling the cooler with. I did this brew in the height of summer and ice did not last long.

I have read mixed feedback about using keezers as a chill water source. I know it will never be as powerful as a glycol chiller but I dont want to spend $1000 on one of those (not yet anyway). I'm not keen on the DIY air-con thing either.

Does anyone have experience with this? I probably can avoid lagering in summer, but would like to be able to do that in other parts of the year. I understand cold crashing could be difficult, is that still effective at temps of say 40 F?

Is it possible to somehow daisy-chain two corny kegs together to provide a larger volume of chill water? Would adding infrastructure like copper piping inside the keezer assist with thermal transfer?

Also interested to hear thoughts on 5 cu/ft keezer builds. I'm thinking this is probably going to be too small and I'll have to go 7, but space is a real premium for me and I have to make this decision carefully.

Thanks for reading if you got this far. Cheers

 

[mongoose33]

If you have room for a 7 cf keezer, do that. You'll regret a 5 cf.

If I were going to do this, I'd focus on a couple of things. First would be insulating the fermenter as much as possible. The better that insulation, the less you'll lose or gain BTUs in your fermenter, and you can have less chilling needed.

Daisy-chaining together two kegs would work--though I'd think about a pre- or post-chilling setup with copper tubing, similar to what people do to pre-chill water used with an immersion chiller.

The fundamental problem as I see it is you want as chilled of water as possible as it works on the fermenter. Warm water entering the kegs or chilling system, if it mixes with the chilling water, will quickly reduce the temp of the chilled water, reducing its effectiveness.

The other issue is how much that keezer will run. You'll potentially over-chill beer in kegs that are mostly empty, possibly underchill beer in those which are full. This means where you put the temperature probe in the keezer will influence what you're getting on the beer side.

I keep coming back to how well you've insulated the fermenter. If you've done that very well, it won't take a lot of cold water to keep the temp down. Have lots of BTU leaks there and it'll run a lot, and I'm not sure how that will influence the beer temp.

Sorry I don't have a definitive answer, but if I were trying to do what you're doing, these are things I'd consider.