How do I know how much beer is left in my keg?

[KPBrews]

Hmm.. maybe Inkbird can add pressure transducers to their temp controllers so you can have a display of weight of each keg.. that minus tare, times 8 lb/gal*FG could tell you how many oz of beer you have left. There are a lot of different ways to skin this cat.

The float and magnet is interesting, but if you are going to go to $20 worth of trouble, why not just weigh the keg?

I see an interesting "Arduino" project...

Fred

Yup .. this.. and you could add a gas pressure transducer and a temp gauge and a LCD display.. how geeky...

http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/weighscale/

Ha! Yes, I watched that video yesterday, doing research on the issue.

Closest project I found to what I had in mind is this guy's "KegMon":

http://www.brettsbeta.com/blog/2015/01/kegmon/

He hasn't connected it to an LCD for continuous external readout, that I can tell, but that would be pretty trivial once the main circuit is built. I sent him an email to discuss further, so we'll see if he responds...

Actually, this project looks really sweet, too: http://hackaday.com/2009/12/14/monitor-keg-volume-co2-and-temp/

... unfortunately, the linked page is dead, so I don't know how to find the guy who built it, since no schematics were supplied. So a KegMon variant seems the most likely option.

All that said, I foresee one of two things in my immediate future:

1) A bathroom scale. Literally. In the fridge. I'd have to open the fridge to look, but at least I won't have to lift the keg and guess. (it's kinda precarious in there) Not sure how long a cheap scale would last in those conditions, but it doesn't have to be forever.

2) The Ball and Keg, which is a rough guide but still very useful and a no-brainer.

Either solution is temporary, but either would only cost a mere ~$20, and should last me until I get around to developing a full-blown Arduino-based solution (probably based mostly off of KegMon). I've built some pretty intense Arduino-based things in the past, so I have the necessary electronics building experience, but I it was a group project and others did the bulk of the programming and circuit design. I'm fairly confident I could work it out, though, it's just a question of time and priorities.

 

[KPBrews]

http://brew.vision The who thing can be set up on any tablet and thats the only cost. Including the new 50$ amazon one.

Looks like a fun project ... I will likely check it out as it matures. But at the moment, it appears to require manual logging of each drink (and presumably you'd need to enter an estimate of how full your keg is as a starting point, then it just subtracts ounces to guess at how much is left), which is not what I'm looking for here. I want a weight-based system so I can see at a glance as the levels drop, and I don't have to log anything as I drink (or guess how much I spill when bottling off the keg, etc.).

 

[poptarts]

ah yea if you want auto logging that will never do what you want. It is however simple to use if you mount a tablet on the kegerator. Ive been using it for almost a year.

 

[KPBrews]

ah yea if you want auto logging that will never do what you want. It is however simple to use if you mount a tablet on the kegerator. Ive been using it for almost a year.

An arduino project will never do auto logging? Not sure what you mean there. Obviously pretty much any feature can be added to the Arduino, of course, even web modules that would interface with a tablet or computer, if that's what you want.

Or if you mean the Brew Vision won't log... I'm not sure what you mean, I guess. Temps?

 

[poptarts]

Brew vision will never do anything but rely on human input for logging.