Using a beer fridge to cool a keezer

[makosiej911]

Hey Everyone,,

Looked through a bunch of threads and couldnt quite find what i was looking for. Just wondering if anyone has used their fridge to cool a separate chest freezer that would store my kegs and ran to a tap on my bar. Basically i am looking to keep my fridge for mix, bottle beer, extra fridge storage and then drilling a decent sized hole to run a pipe to a chest freezer to keep my kegs cool as well. I am thinking i would have to put in a fan in the pipe to direct cool air to the freezer. Anyone think this will work or am I just a crazy Canadian with some crazy ass ideas!?! LOL

Thanks in advance to all to take to read this potential nonsense ha

 

[day_trippr]

I suppose it depends on the relative sizes of the fridge and freezer. I wouldn't bother with the attempt if it's a mini fridge/bar fridge regardless of the freezer size, but a full-size fridge with a small chest freezer might have a shot of working reasonably well.

You'd need two holes and duct work between the two with one leg being fan driven and the other serving as a return. Probably want the holes at each end separated by as much distance as possible.

All that said, given how cheap freezers can be - especially if you can find a scratch/dent sale - I'd just pick up a new unit and skip all the aggro...

Cheers!

 

[makosiej911]

Can you set a freezer to stay warm enough not to freeze beer though?

 

[day_trippr]

On its own, highly unlikely. Freezers are designed to freeze stuff and keep them frozen, after all, and their thermostats usually don't have "non-frozen" scope.

But, plug the freezer into any of the add-on controllers we home brewers use and you can transform a freezer into a serviceable "fridge" for use as a fermentation chamber or a beer dispensing appliance.

I have a 7 keg/6 tap keezer using a 13cf chest freezer. It's plugged into a device that will allow setting pretty much any temperature below ambient one might desire...

Cheers!

 

[TallDan]

Can you set a freezer to stay warm enough not to freeze beer though?

Yes. On freezers with mechanical thermostats there is often a coarse adjustment screw somewhere that can be used to adjust it to fridge temps. The other option is to use a temp controller as mentioned above.

I have two freezers that i keep at fridge temps, one with the coarse adjustment method and the other with a temp controller.

 

[makosiej911]

What are guys using for a temp controller that is reliable??

 

[day_trippr]

One of the most popular units these days is the InkBird ITC-308. True plug and play wrt controlling a freezer for use as a keezer or ferm chamber.
fwiw, I use BrewPi to control my keezer, running on the same RaspberryPi that runs my RaspberryPints tap list, but that's way more involved

Cheers!

 

[jeeppilot]

I did this using an old freezer kept at 38F for keg serving and a Son of a Chiller type ferm chamber. I used an old analog Ranco for controlling the freezer and my Brewpi would switch on a 12V case fan, as necessary, attached to a 2” insulated pvc pipe that ran between the two. A second 2” pipe served as a return. It worked well for chilling my ferm chamber to ale and lagering temps, though it struggled a bit to reach crash-cooling temps. It’s a very cheap, quick solution that fit my needs!