Hey People!,

Well I have an old dorm fridge sitting here and I am interested in building a keg bot. However, I cant find any diy step by step plans and parts. Can someone lead me in the right direction? I have tried googling, etc. and only can get the knock off plans :-(. I will be sure to post pics from a party and share my building experience.

Thanks In Advance,

Tyler

If it's a small dorm fridge, I'm going to tell you this is a mistake. I've built 3 kegerators in my life, 2 out of dorm fridges, and helped several friends with the same.

The compressor in those just can't keep up and runs almost 24/7

I have a power meter that monitors the current draw, the dorm fridge model cost around $9-10 a month in electricity. (electricity in MI is fairly cheap too)

The freezer model that I just built is closer to $15-$20 per YEAR.

If you do have to do it that way, Measure up a keg that's a little strange on size... I got a keg of blue moon that just didn't fit in the same box that the domestic beers fit in.

Build the kegerator out of plywood or MDF and use 1-1/2 or 2 inch hard stryfoam insulation on the side walls. Figure out a way to mount the cooling element in the side and calk all possible openings.

Joe

It really depends on your space constraints as well.

Whoops...sent before I finished.
Anyways, like I was saying, space is also an issue. A dorm style fridge isn't a bad idea if you don't have the space for a larger freezer, be it chest or upright. As for running 24/7, sounds like it was more an issue of bad insulation or someone opening the door repeatedly. The compressor only turns on to bring the temp to a set level. If it were running continuously, that would mean that someone a heat source was being introduced and upping the temps...

Myself, I built a kegerator out of a Sanyo 4911 mini fridge. While it can't hold a commercial keg, it holds two corny kegs and a co2 bottle comfortably. The compressor rarely turns on, even with a badly insulated draft tower sticking out the top of it.

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, William Adams wrote:

Whoops...sent before I finished.
Anyways, like I was saying, space is also an issue. A dorm style fridge isn't a bad idea if you don't have the space for a larger freezer, be it chest or upright. As for running 24/7, sounds like it was more an issue of bad insulation or someone opening the door repeatedly. The compressor only turns on to bring the temp to a set level. If it were running continuously, that would mean that someone a heat source was being introduced and upping the temps...

But if the cooling load is greater than the capacity of the compressor, then you're going to have a hard time keeping the compressor from running all the time.

A keg of beer is a lot of mass to keep cool.

Eh? Introducing a keg into the insulated environment of the fridge, and assuming the keg's temp is higher than that of it's new environment, sure. The compressor will have to work a little harder to drop the keg's temp. Once done however the keg is no longer a heat source and the compressor will drop back to it's normal duty cycle.

Perhaps I've missed something?

The normal duty for dorm fridges already will have a hard time if like your beer between 34 and 36F degrees, even before you rip it out, and ask it to cool 3 times the area.

Joe

You've got it right William, once the keg is cooled the compressor won't run any more than usual. Actually the cool mass of the keg will work as a thermal mass to retain the cool better than an empty fridge would.
The only time the compressor would run more was when the warm keg was put in the fridge.

Scott

I don't know if this is something you all want to do, but I have set up a Kegbot Google Group. It is the same thing as the mailing list you see here, (send emails to kegbot@googlegroups.com), but it will catalog all our conversations, and allow new people to see previous questions so we don't have to here the same questions over and over again. Its a very handy tool, and perfect for this discussion. Sign up for the group at http://groups.google.com/group/kegbot to receive all discussion emails and send all emails to kegbot@googlegroups.com or post once you have logged in to the google group (you can turn off the email part of it so you don't get emails, and just follow the discussion from the group).

Mailman already keeps an archive of all the old posts to the mailing list, it's at: http://kegbot.org/pipermail/kegbot-dev/ Splitting discussions into two seperate groups just seems like a bad idea to me. It's way too early in this project, and there's too few people involved, to have a fork

-Andrew

Quoting Tyler Cooper tylerdcooper@gmail.com: