Freezer on top Kegerator/Fermentation chamber combo advice

[Darth_Duane]

I am just getting in to home brewing and I was lucky enough to have a pretty new refrigerator gifted to me. Unfortunately it is of the freezer on top fridge on bottom variety. I have seen a ton of great combo builds on here using side by side refrigerators, but I've only found one that used a top/bottom implementation. A friend and I are going to do our best to hack this thing up and make it work.

Right now the plan is to remove the shelf between the freezer and refrigerator and build a new one lower down to allow corny kegs to be placed on top of it with enough room underneath for a 6.5 gallon carboy. We would of course insulate the heck out of the shelf. We would then install fans controlled by a STC-1000 to pull cool air from the top down and a return similar to the side by side setups I've seen.

My initial thoughts were to just let the thermostat of the freezer handle the compressor, but it looks like most people use a second temperature controller for that so i will have to consider that.

I've searched quite a bit but it's hard to get the search terms just right to filter for just top/bottom implementations. Any tips/pictures from others that have done this?

 

[JLeuck64]

Probably not exactly what you are looking for... but I kept my free fridge/fermentation chamber simple. I can ferment on the bottom using the STC1000 to turn on the fridge or the hair dryer. I've only been using this setup for a few months now. I have been using the bottom chamber to ferment/condition so far. Once I used it to chill down to serving temps and it worked out well also. Mostly I use the bottom chamber to ferment. I've started experimenting with using the top chamber to keep bottled water cold and it never froze so I thought I would try it with bottled homebrew and it's been working great this summer! The bottom shelf will hold three 7-1/2 gallon buckets to ferment after adding an additional support to the stock glass shelf.

 

[Darth_Duane]

Nice! Did you modify the air flow from the freezer to the fridge section at all?

 

[JLeuck64]

Nope, left that portion alone. It's really just a bone stock fridge