CO2 pressure question

[GRHunter]

I have a 5 gallon, ball lock, stainless steel, cornelious with a 5# CO2 bottle. I have a few questions on pressure. First, I am going to add priming sugar for fermentation. How much pressure do I need? Do I need to keep the keg connected to the CO2, or can I just disconnect it and leave it. Second, how much pressure will I need when it comes time to serve my beer?

 

[david_42]

Hit it with 30 psi to seat the seal, then disconnect.

Serving pressure depends on the beer, but 8-12 psi works for most.

 

[Gofastr1]

If you "serve" at 8-12 psi, won't that blast out your tap? I keep my kegerator at ~42F and, depending on the style, store with the pressure at 10-14psi. However, before serving through my picnic taps and 12 - 18" of hose, I release the pressure in the corney I'm serving from to about 2psi for a good pour.

But this is a hassle as after drinking, I've got to charge up those kegs from which I poured back to 10-14psi to keep the carbonation right. And depending upon how much I've had, I sometimes don't bother/remember to do that until the next day - and it's still a hassle and seems a waste of CO2. So how do you deal with that? I've seen some of the keezer setup pics on this site and note lot's of long beer line coiled on top of corneys, I guess to allow pressure drop from an 8 - 14psi keg to a nice 2psi or so at the tap, so no need to release pressure to serve?

Is that the idea and is there a chart somewhere that gives this pressure drop per foot of beer line?

 

[SumnerH]

If you "serve" at 8-12 psi, won't that blast out your tap? I keep my kegerator at ~42F and, depending on the style, store with the pressure at 10-14psi. However, before serving through my picnic taps and 12 - 18" of hose, I release the pressure in the corney I'm serving from to about 2psi for a good pour.

But this is a hassle as after drinking, I've got to charge up those kegs from which I poured back to 10-14psi to keep the carbonation right. And depending upon how much I've had, I sometimes don't bother/remember to do that until the next day - and it's still a hassle and seems a waste of CO2. So how do you deal with that? I've seen some of the keezer setup pics on this site and note lot's of long beer line coiled on top of corneys, I guess to allow pressure drop from an 8 - 14psi keg to a nice 2psi or so at the tap, so no need to release pressure to serve?

Is that the idea and is there a chart somewhere that gives this pressure drop per foot of beer line?

Balance your lines with the CO2 pressure so that you can serve at the same pressure as the beer.

With regular 3/16" ID beer lines a good first guess is:

line length in feet = (pressure in volumes - height of taps in feet)/2

So if you use picnic taps, you're about 1.5 feet over the center of the keg when serving. To serve at 12 volumes:

line length = (12 - 1.5)/2 = 5.25 feet.

The exact length is going to depend on the material the lines are made of. http://kegman.net/balance.html has more detail.

Using somewhat longer lines usually isn't a problem--you'll get slower pours, but no foam. Using shorter lines will get you a lot of foam.