Insulating Wine Fridge Door?

[Qoheleth]

I'm about to jump into kegging (I have a Brew Logic dual tap system that's supposed to arrive on Tuesday!) and I have a Danby wine fridge I'll be converting to a kegerator in a couple weeks. Obviously a normal fridge would be better, but I scored this guy super cheap off Craiglist - so cheap I couldn't justify not buying it. I've checked out various wine fridge to kegerator builds on the forums and the interwebs - (actually, my fridge has the same model number as Denny's here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/danby-dwc440bl-keggerator-12860/) - and I'll post my own build once I dig in in a few weeks, but here's my question:

Anyone ever drilled through the bottom or side edge of a wine fridge door and sprayed insulation (Great Stuff or whatever) between the panes of glass to help the fridge maintain a cool 38F? In my mind it seems like this would work, but the real world has a habit of not always agreeing with me. Any experiences or thoughts??

Thanks!

 

[woodstone]

I don't know much about your fridge but most wine fridges don't get that cold...wines are stored relatively cool, not cold, and so the cooling systems are usually not as robust as a regular fridge...something you might need to look into.

...that said, and again I don't know much about the Danby but I've got to believe the glass panes are probably coated with an insulating gas between them...much like a household double pane window...

The door is probably insulated enough for your purposes and as soon as you break the seal between the panes, I think your asking for trouble...loss of insulating gas, structural instability of the door (i.e., glass breakage), allowing moisture to build up between the panes, etc......

Perhaps line the inside of the door with insulating foam board...this might help and you can spray paint it or come up with some other design to show through the glass and hide your interior contents.

My $0.02.

 

[Qoheleth]

Thanks for the input. I'll take all the cents and sense I can. I wondered about what's actually between the panes - if it might not be something other than just air. Didn't know household double panes have insulating gas. That makes sense. I definitely don't want to cause some kind of catastrophic failure. I'll do some more digging around and see what I can come up with about the Danby. But it's probably better safe than sorry in this case.

On the bright side, I did a trail run cooling it down with my Johnson controller and it got to 38F no problem. So that puts me just looking to improve the efficiency. I'm not sure they'll be room for insulation inside once the kegs arrive, but I'll know more Tuesday.

I'm planning a build thread once everything's here and I have a chance to get stuff hooked up.

Anyone who uses (or tried) a wine fridge have some advice? What's worked? What hasn't?

 

[samc]

I sometimes used a piece of foam board to cover the glass, but honestly as you found out the wine fridges can pump out more than enough cold that the loss through the glass seems insignificant to me. I froze an entire keg of Lager into an ice cube in my wine fridge last winter in the garage.

 

[Qoheleth]

Oh man. If that's the case I guess I won't have anything to worry about. That's what I'd call hardcore lagering. Good to hear about success keeping the temp down though. I'll just have to wait and see how my particular unit handles it in the long run. The insulation board seems like it'd be the best bet for squeezing out every bit of efficiency I can. Thanks for the input.