Advice needed - Short(ish) glycol system

[ryantollefson]

Background:

• I have built-in taps that are fed from a kegerator in a closet next to the bar.
• Lines are about 11' long, but kinda snake through the wall.
• Blower system isn't working well enough to keep lines cold - foaming issues with beer, carb issues with the fizzy water
• After a while the kegerator will ice over & stop cooling properly if I run the blower fan too much (it can't keep up)
  • Doing ~30% duty cycle fixed that, but lines don't stay cool enough (really didn't stay cold enough at 100% on time)

After all of the fiddling with this, I'm getting really sick of it (wasted beer, and not-happy SWMBO because of her not-fizzy enough water)

I'm really debating on a glycol system, but not sure what to look at for this... almost everything I see looks like it's designed for really long runs, or large volumes and has a price to match. On the other hand, I'm not super interested in hacking together an AC system - this will go in an inside closet, and SWMBO will want it to look professional & have very little risk of failure.

I've been kicking around the Kalinka 25' system (not cheap), as well as waiting for the Stasis (not really designed for serving).

I figure someone here must have had similar issues... I feel like I'm overlooking something.

Any tips?

 

[day_trippr]

It seems ~$1K is the entry level for trunk line chillers; I found three different units and they're all in the $900-$1K range.
I understand the pain - that price hit for chilled trunk lines is usually spread over an easier-to-justify much longer run, but you're pretty much stuck with the overkill.

On the up side, it'll only hurt once

Cheers!

 

[ryantollefson]

Thanks day_trippr.

Getting closer to pulling the trigger... this means re-doing beverage lines to the tower as well, and that raised another question:

• Is there any downside to having extra empty lines in the trunk line? Thinking since I only have 2 taps, I only need 2 lines, but I'm thinking if I got a 4 line trunk (+ glycol lines) I would have extra I could swap for down the road (like several years) instead of replacing it all. Would this affect efficiency at all since they'd be empty?