Yes! Take that, foam!

[stn]

After spending north of $2K for a new kegerator and living with all foam pours for 3 months, I finally addressed the issue. $80 and an afternoon of work fixed the problem. Thanks to several on this forum, and KillianBoy and djc in particular, for all the great information. Mods were new 9' beer lines to offset the ******* faucets, a circulating fan and a tower cooler. The only thing I have left to do is drill a small hole through the side to run the power cables for the fans out to the power supply, but they are so small that for now just taking them out the door seal works fine.

I cleaned everything thoroughly and ran BLC through the system, brought two new sixtels home and let them sit in the kegartor for 5 hours before tapping. And other than a little burst of foam on the very first pour, I'm getting perfect pours now. Thank you!


I don't know which was harder to explain to mrs. stn, why a $2k kegerator doesn't work very well, or how it is that $80 in small bits made all the difference.


Here's a look at the mods:

The Stuff.jpg


And here's the result:

The pour.jpg

[KillianBoy]

stn,
No problems, just make sure you have a clear air flow back from tower and the tube from box should blow directly on to shank. Try and experiment with your fans, if you had box on floor of unit, you wouldn't need the circulating fan. With *******s you may have to deal with the burst of foam, they extend further out then the standard faucets, but you won't have sticky faucts.
KB

[stn]

KB,

At the moment I'm just so dang happy not to have to deal with glass after glass of foam that it's hard to imagine getting it any better, but I'm sure I will try several tweaks. The tower cooler air tube is sitting right beneath the shanks, pointed directly up and centered on them (side by side double tap.) I'm getting a second pour temp of 37.8 degrees with a calibrated digital thermometer and running at 14 psi. Both kegs I'm running are in the 2.55 to 2.6 carbonation range, so I finally seem to have things balanced. I still have to give about a two second pull to get rid of some initial foam if there is more than several minutes bewteen pours, but that's it. I attribute that to the ******* faucets. I just add the initial pour off to my glass after it settles. Life is good.

You were right in your caution from the earlier thread that the hole in the top of the unit is much smaller than the ID of the tower. Moreover, the tower is insulated with a loose piece of foam basically just rolled up inside the tower, which eats up some space. With both beer lines and the air tube in place I could see some small daylight through the tower, so I decided not to enlarge the hole or try any different insulation in the tower for now. I'm sure the return airflow could be improved, though, which I'll tackle when I build the kegerator into my bar since I'll have to reconfigure the tower connection at that point anyway.

I've also noticed that I'm getting a lot of condensation on the outside of the tower. I have the kegerator on my screen porch and it's been very humid here (and yes, it's an outdoor rated model), so some condensation is not a total surprise. But that tells me the tower is not insulated well enough and I'm probably losing some cooling effect inside the tower. For the short term I'm wondering if some kind of temporary insulation on the outside of the tower would help.

[KillianBoy]

stn,
You can look for different types of insulation, I found one with adhesive on one side and foam on the other, this can be used on the inside. Outside you can look at can koozies, another member mentioned this as an aesthetically pleasing alternative to standard foam insulation.
I forgot about your dual tap,you might have to experiment with different "Y" connectors to split air flow. You could try and experiment by putting out-flow from cooler on only one faucet and note any difference between the 2, but best way to cool 2 faucets is to run 2 hoses, the cooler box you have should handle another hose but until you enlarge the hole 1 hose will have to do.
KB