My boss's 1400mm high integrated fridge at home was only cooling intermittently so I brought it home and had a poke about to see if i could replace the serving fridge with a full blown kegerator
, hopefully with all the beer line in the fridge there'll be no spoilage 
For a start I could squeeze 4 cornies stacked 2 high and hopefully I'll be able to fit the gas in there too next to the compressor housing
I programmed my Arduino HERMS box as a min/max themp logger and hooked up my TC-10 to to see how it worked. I found the compressor only turned on when in 'supercool' mode which only works for a few minutes.
After bypassing the thermostat the TC-10 controlled it down to 2° for 10 minutes or so which was good enough for me
After a good clean, looking at the fridge's control panel it looked like TC-10 might fit with the existing circuit board removed, so I got the jigsaw out and hacked out a hole in the control panel. After a bit of chiseling and filing in it went
Next I transferred the tube heater from the existing fridge and wired that into the TC-10.
That's about all I had time for yesterday, bar marking out the position of the tap holes; I've two Dalex flow control taps and need to get a couple more. Nice bling German taps would be nice but that would blow the budget that currently stands at £nil
Next on the agenda, after fitting the taps, is to devise a way to display how much is left in each keg. Buoyed by the success of my Arduino HERMS set-up I've been investigating how I could use an Arduino for the task. There are a few people who have hacked bathroom scales successfully to weigh a keg and work out how much beer is left, but with kegs stacked 2 high that wouldn't work.
Sparkfun have a Tweeting kegerator that uses reed a switch to detect if the handle is pulled. I'm thinking that I could do something similar and attach a tilt switch to each tap and time how long it takes to pull a pint, I could then program the Arduino to work out how much is left based on how long the handle has been pulled. I would have to make sure that the CO2 pressure is kept constant and the length of beer line is the same to each keg to ensure that each pint takes the same amount of time to pour. I'd also have to make sure the kegs start off with the same amount of beer in them, or devise a way to input the volume of the keg before it's 'taped'.
That's all for now folks, stay tuned for further updates
Cheers,
Jamie
