Keg Box, no floor drain

[Jeff Stanley]

I run into this quite a bit.

Keg boxes discharge their drain lines less than an inch from the floor. If a floor drain isn't a few feet from the discharge, it is impossible to run a gravity drain line anywhere.

What do you guys use to solve this? I have run too-long horizontal pipes and not been happy with the result. I've even seen people just put a bucket in the keg box to catch the drain pan, and just let the condensate drain onto the ground.

I have seen people use these low profile electric pumps. Has anyone used these for an extended period of time and found them to be effective? They are listed as a "condensate" pump but the specs look like it would be adequate for a drain-line pump too.

Any advice on what you do will be helpful. This is a far too common problem. Most of the time I just tell people they need to figure it out themselves, but they never do and the "bucket method" seems to be the most popular. I'd like to solve this for several people in my market.

[THE ICEMAN]

A condensate pump works great for just water but unfortunately little critters like beer as much as we do. The pump would clog up with bacteria & mold fairly quickly. About the only thing to keep that from happening is to regularly rinse out the drain with a bleach/water solution.

THE ICEMAN

[Suliman]

Originally Posted by THE ICEMAN

A condensate pump works great for just water but unfortunately little critters like beer as much as we do. The pump would clog up with bacteria & mold fairly quickly. About the only thing to keep that from happening is to regularly rinse out the drain with a bleach/water solution.

THE ICEMAN

So would that work ok? I have a Beverage Air DD58 on a cement floor. I have a drain in the wall a few feet away, but I assume that's not good enough. If I get a drain pump and just make sure to regularly clean it would that be acceptable?

[Scott Zuhse]

Reroute the drain lines so that your gravity feed begins as high as possible in the box versus directing the lines through the bottom of the box. This may entail punching a new hole in the box and then gradually running to a floor drain indirectly. Once routed, heed the Iceman's advice and keep it clean.

[Jeff Stanley]

Originally Posted by Scott Zuhse

Reroute the drain lines so that your gravity feed begins as high as possible in the box versus directing the lines through the bottom of the box. This may entail punching a new hole in the box and then gradually running to a floor drain indirectly. Once routed, heed the Iceman's advice and keep it clean.

I've done that before. I don't like it as a real solution (although it's not any worse than other things I've tried).

Keg boxes don't have traditional pipe fittings, they have those horrible fragile two-piece white things. You must put a small bit of hose on the drain fitting, then an elbow to get the hose to run to the side of the box. This leaves you a couple inches from the ceiling of the cooler. The drain runs horizontally across the top of the door and gets in the way, even if you do a good job of strapping it up there. If you've never actually done it look at one some time and think through the problems it creates and how exposed and in the way the makeshift drain line becomes.

It might be a reasonable solution if there was a drain fitting available that could be more easily attached to a more rigid piece of pipe.

The design of the drain systems on every box in the market is a joke. They are almost designed to fail or create problems. If you guys have any influence with the manufacturers it would be a useful thing to address in future designs.