Making My own Kegerator

The time had arrived where by we were finally sick of continuously washing bottles.

We decided it was time to make the move to using kegs. This meant we needed a way to dispense the beer from the kegs, hence the need for a kegerator.

The choice was then: buy a ready made one, or make one ourselves.

Several factors came into play here, the first being price.  A new kegerator is about $600 with twin taps, and takes 3 kegs.

We bought a 200L chest freezer for $300, a twin tap font for $120, a temperature controller for $80 and hoses and fitting for $40. Total price $540.

We could have cut the controller price to $35 if we wanted to just replace the freezer controller, but we opted for an external unit which still allows us to use it as a freezer if needed.

The second factor was space.  The freezer can fit 4 19L kegs, plus 2 9L kegs on the motor shelf.

The last factor is the running costs or efficiency.  The chest freezer running at fridge temps, and because it has better insulation, hardly runs at all.  And because it is top opening, you retain all the cold air when you open it - unlike the kegerator which is more like a small bar fridge and needs to run quite often to hold its temperature.

So how did we do it?

We started off by marking out and drilling 2 holes through the lid to take the beer lines.
We then used rubber grommets to line and seal the holes around the beer lines.

                  We then feed the beer lines through, and screwed the font to the lid of the freezer.

                                                      The keg lines were then connected

And after a couple of hours to cool down the first beers were ready to be poured.

You will notice that we placed the taps to one side rather than in the middle, this gives us room to mount a second set of taps at a later date.

We haven't mentioned the gas bottle...at the moment it lives inside the freezer as we have only 2 kegs in there. As we get more the gas bottle will be outside the freezer, and the gas line run over the lip between the lid and the body.

Disclaimer : we are not knocking the kegerator brand,

this will just give us more of what we were looking for.