Line cleaning with a Corni??

[froggi]

Hi all..... With the potential glut of Corni's (see elsewhere on the site) expected in our abodes, I was thinking the other day about having a "spare" Corni filled with sanitising solution and hooking it up my future set up and cleaning out the lins/tap by pressurising the keg, opening the tap and letting the system flush through. Anyone see a problem with this and if so could you offer explanations as to why it wouldn't work??
Cheers all in advance
froggi

[GrowlingDogBeer]

I'm sure that would work fine. It would be worth checking that the cleaner you are using is OK with long term conatct with Stainless Steel.

What I tend to do is when a keg is empty I give it a quick wash with water to remove the crud, then fill it with hot water and Oxy Cleaner, pressurise it up and give it a good shake, I then connect it back up to the line I disconnected it from and wash the beer line out with hot Oxy solution.

After 30 mins or so I empty the keg, rinse i out, put some water in it and pressurise up and connect it to the beer line and rinse it out with water.

I very rarely sanitise my beer lines if I'm honest, I probably should.

Occasionally I have a cleaning purge and clean all the lines in one go when I have a keg full of hot oxy solution, and occasionally run some Starsan through

[mazz1964]

you would be better using a proper cellar line cleaner. You can buy it online or on ebay. The method is basically the same but the dilution rate is 10ml to 1 litre of water. Tip the diluted solution in a keg gas and let it out through the tap it only needs a couple of mins contact time to sanitise then just flush through a couple of times with hot water

[froggi]

So the idea is sound then..... Thought there'd be no issues with it but as a reletive noob, I thought I'd run it past you guys just for peace of mind

Thanks guys for the back up

[Shodi]

I clean my lines every time I keg a brew, firstly with the oxy solution then clean water and finally with videne no rinse solution. since I have to do this with the keg anyway I may as well run it through my lines.
I only have three cornies atm so I usually have two full and one emptying rapidly ;^)

[Frothy]

I use purple beer line cleaner. It's basically a bleach soln with a pH sensitive dye that indicates whether your lines are clean or not. Easy to knock up a couple of litres in a corny and its widely used. Just don't leave it in a keg as it will stain the keg and loose its potency too. Make fresh.

[Kev888]

The key thing would be using the right cleaner - most of those I could find either don't last long after mixing and/or aren't really safe for long term contact with the corny. Most of the cellars I've seen have special pressuriseable plastic bottles/kegs for the cleaning solution, presumably as contact time doesn't then matter.

Personally I decided that it would be better to keep a spare corny but empty rather than having it permanently filled - then you can use it for both the cleaning and rinsing (and/or sanitising) solutions and choose whatever chemicals you prefer. In practice though I find I can wait until one 'becomes' spare, as I don't feel the need to clean the lines out more often than that, though I guess that'll depend on your turnover..

Also, I made a cleaning bottle from a pump-action garden sprayer but by the time you have bought and managed to bodge on a corny product post I'm not convinced in retrospect that it saves much over the ease and convenience of just using another corny; the bottle does get used occasionally, but mostly I just use whatever corny I'm currently cleaning.

Cheers
Kev