My kids just gave me a kegging system for Christmas

Congrats on the gift. As for the regulator, one gauge shows the tank pressure and the other is the gauge you use to set the pressure going to the keg. Cheers,

I have found pin lock easier to use. They seem to go on-off easier. Sometimes the ball-lock fittings seem to bind a bit. Lubrication might help this. It is also easier to tell the "in" from the "out" with the pin-lock. Also, the pin-lock kegs I have use a commonly available o-ring for the poppet seal rather than a specially shaped seal, so poppet replacement might be less frequent.

All that said, I have several of each, and dual hoses on the CO2 to fit either, and a few of each for taps. Either keg does the job. Whatever is most common in your area is probably best, but don't turn down a freebie just because it is different. Hose fittings are cheaper than kegs.

Bob

Pepsi = Ball-lock = taller/thinner Coke = Pin-lock = shorter/wider

I can fit three ball-lock cornies in my chest freezer with little room to spare. Ball-locks are problematic. I have difficulty getting them on and off.

Dick

And I might add that the tank pressure gauge is practically useless. The needle is going to sit still until the tank is almost completely empty, at which point it will plummet to zero. CO2 is actually a liquid inside the tank. I'm not sure why people bother with a tank pressure gauge, but it's the norm. Anyway, don't pay attention to it. Weigh your tank fresh, so you know when it's almost empty (there's 5 pounds of CO2 in there).

Scott

Nice gift. Great kids :)

Ball lock seems to be more abundant and they work fine for me. A chest freezer with a temp control works great or any old fridge will do.

You can look for them on:

If you want to get fancy here's an excellent site with DIY:

I got lucky and found my 2 tap kegerator on craigslist and it was already made. Just somebody getting out of the brewing hobby.

For me kegging beats bottling hands down.

Good luck and this group is a great resource for those "what do I do now?" and also the you will not believe what just happened to me/what I did?"

Maybe, but they're probably just high and low pressure gauges. IE, the high pressure gauge tells you the internal pressure of the tank. That's the most common type of dual gauge setup on these tanks.

If you really do have two low pressure gauges with seperate outputs, that's really nice for serving different styles at different carbonation levels.

I prefer pin-lock kegs, however they are getting much more difficult to find. By far, the "standard" within the hobby as far as availability and parts is the ball-lock style.

I use this method, but not many people do. I've posted quite a bit about it in the past, you could probably search through groups.google.com on rec.crafts.brewing for "coldplate" and find lots of info.

Basically, it works well for relatively low consumption rates. If you try to pour too many beers through it too quickly, the coldplate won't be able to keep up and the beers will start coming out warm. It works fine for my personal consumption, and I've had parties with 5 or so people drinking a couple beers each. However, it would fail miserably for something like a frat party. Also, the colder you want to serve the beer the more sensitive it will be to needing "cool down" time between each pour.

John.

No one else has said anything, am I the only one that received an attachment with this message?

Mark R

The attachment was an 'big smile' emoticon, and it was attached to my original email post by mistake -- not that the smile was a mistake, but I did not intend for it to appear as a separate attachment instead of directly in the text. I never open attachments in newsgroups, and only rarely in personal emails, so I can appreciate your concern. Sorry about that.

Also, I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their helpful replies. I have been struggling with a few non-brew related problems in the past couple of days -- such as replacing a computer which was zapped by a power surge -- and haven't had the time to devote to this thread. Again, thanks to everyone for their advice.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

I wasn't trying to be a news group cop or anything, just wondered. And I don't open attachments either.

Sorry to hear about the confuser problems. In back to back thunder storms one week apart I had a lightning strike come through the phone line and fry my external modem (fortunately it stopped there) and the next week a one second power outage caused a power surge that blew the power supply. After changing the power supply I managed to stick my finger into the spinning CPU fan and managed to knock a blade off the fan. After cleaning up the blood I had to go back and buy a new CPU cooler. Good luck

Mark R

snip

About a year ago I replaced computer #1 and took it's hard drives and temporarily installed them into computer #2 so I could transfer files to the drive on new computer #3. When I finished, I was getting up from my chair and my foot became tangled in the mouse cord from computer #2 and ripped the socket loose from the motherboard enough that it didn't work anymore; well, at least it wasn't the mouse to the NEW computer, or I would have gone ballistic. Fortunately, the computer I ruined was one that I really didn't need anymore.

On topic: today I am facing a real marathon. Am going to bottle three different 5-gallon batches (150 bottles or so) that have just finished their secondary: Cherry Wheat, California Common, and IPA. I guess it will be a bit of time before I can start using my new kegging system, since our second freezer (the one that I will convert) is filled to the top with food, as is our other freezer. A jockey-box doesn't appeal to me enough right now for me to mess with that temporarily, although it might be something nice to have for picnics and that sort of thing. How long can the coils be in the jocket box? I seem to recall reading about foaming problems based on pressure vs. length of hose, or something like that. I guess I'm going to have to do a good bit of reading soon about kegging.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

If it was just the mouse that didn't work, a USB mouse would be a solution.

Bob

There was an attachmenbt on my copy. It's just a smiley face, it displays at the bottom of the message in my reader.

-Rick

But you can use it to tell the temperature.

Bob

Towards the end of the tank of CO2 the high pressure gauge begins to fall. When this happens, I make sure I have a second tank filled and ready. Its not completely useless, just not accurate.