The perils of being a meddler: Outfoxing yourself

[Lurks]

I bought a second hand fridge for beer fermenting/conditioning. It's a total monster at 450L. Total bargain, it's only a couple of years old and cost me $240 off Gumtree and the bloke delivered it for a few notes more.

I let it settle for a few hours and fire it up. It beeps at me gently to start, then constantly beeps. Oh dear. Immediately I put on my "it's a technical thing and I know about technical things" hat and begin to meddle.

So I set about reading up on fridges, how long do they need to be left before you fire them up, why is that anyway, then flaws with this make of fridge, beeping error codes etc. A couple of hours of pissing around on the internet, reading manuals, looking at fridgy sites. I can't work out what might be wrong so I set about dismantling the fridge to have a closer look. **** eh, they build stuff cheap these days eh?

I notice the fan never fires up. I pull out the controller, disassemble the ducts, trace the wiring, test the temp probes and the fan.

At some point during this testing I put some tape over the door switch so I can see if the fan is getting power. Switch on, fan fires up, no beeps, fridge fine. It dawns on me. I've taken all the shelves off the front door of the fridge, one of them, or rather the cover over the egg holder thing, is what actually pushes the fridge door button. If you take it off, the fridge door switch is never pressed.

FAIL.

 

[m3taL]

Oh the Joys!!!!

love things like that they remind you were only human

 

[carniebrew]

Bloody GOLD. Your thread title could have been simply KISS. I wish I could follow my own advice sometimes!

 

[tonyt]

I know how you feel, the other day, decided to clean my lines in two tap kegerator. I use a garden sprayer, anyhow, flushed through left hand tap, all good, try to flush rh tap, nothing coming out! WTF I think. Spend the next 10 minutes pulling apart disconects effing around cursing, sweating from a combination of panic and humidity, kicked the dog once cause it was licking the floor of the fridge...,,tried again, nothing! Tried the left hand tap again, yep you guessed it.... Cleaner came out of rh tap...Me
dic$&head connected the wrong tap! Now I have tied a cable tie to the Lh tap...... Or is it the right?

 

[Truman42]

In answer to one of your questions...If you lay a fridge on its side the oil in the compressor can run up into the head of the compressor instead of sitting down in the sump like its supposed to. That's why you should leave them upright for a few hours before switching back on to allow the oil to drain back into the bottom of the compressor
But only if you have had it laying on its side.

 

[jyo]

It's just a shame you didn't ring the guy back and abuse him for selling you a piece of **** dud before you solved the problem. :lol:

 

[QldKev]

I was cleaning my taps back when I had the keggerator in the office. About half way through I though geeze, I feel like a beer. Put the right hand tap back on and connected the left hand beer line. Beer straight over my son and his monitor.

QldKev

 

[Nick JD]

I have a spare beer QD for putting on empty kegs and squirting starsan down the tube. Once, I connected it to a keg ... the wrong keg. Wasn't empty, was full of carbonated beer.

You'd be amazed how fast the beer leaves the keg through an unimpeeded QD.

 

[Lurks]

Bah, all this talk of kegs. You utter bastards, I'd love to keg. Well at least I've got the fridge for it now.

Keg setup when I finish the phd maybe... they're quite a lot of baked beans.

Mat.

 

[pk.sax]

Gumtree kegs can be as good as the shop ones got all the bits for my erstwhile setup thrown in from gumtree bargains, c'ept the taps n shanks.

Your thread reminds me of trying to setup my first temp controller, there was a fair bit of silent swearing before I realised how to turn the f'in thing from heat to cool.

 

[Lurks]

I hadn't really thought of kegs from gumtree, I'll keep an eye out!

That said it's the CO2 bottle, regs and all that too... if only I had an over-abundance of kidneys to sell.

 

[pk.sax]

You'd be surprised what people who are getting out of it after a few kit brews (no prejudice here) sell their gear for... Just like someone very nice reminded me of recently bottles n regs et al....

 

[Lurks]

Well I scored a gem with the fridge so here's hoping eh?

 

[Nick JD]

Kegs pay for themselves at minimum wage.

You count up all the hours you spend bottling in a year, then multiply that by $14.50 you will have paid for a kegging setup.

So, buy some kegs and a reg and hire a gas bottle ... and flip burgers with the other PhDs in your bottling time.

 

[Lurks]

Frankly I don't find bottling particularly onerous, or that time consuming for that matter.

That's a pretty small part of wanting to move to kegs. So sadly I can't really make the whole investment argument.

Not when the missus has no job presently and I'm working two... mortgage trumps kegs.

(hiring a gas bottle sounds interesting though - err... I wonder if I could use an old scuba tank under the stairs...)