Howdy guys, I've been taking some time off for the holidays, and my beer has been chilling in a keg in a mini fridge for about a month. Luckily, I've had some days off work due to snow and I've finally made progress on setting up the tap system.
I wanted a tap coming out of the wall rather than out of the top of a fridge, for purely aesthetic reasons. To this end, I bought a length of 1" pvc, some insulation, and assorted joints. I needed to get a beer line out of the fridge, into the wall, out the wall at around eye level, attached to the faucet, insulated, and somehow have air circulating around it to keep it cool.
I decided on this: I'd insulate a length of pipe with elbows at each end, run an air tube and beer line through it, cut two holes in my bar's dry wall, get the pipe behind the drywall and attach it's end to either hole. The upper hole would need to have room for the faucet to attach, both would need to fix the pipe in place, and both would need to be airtight to help the air circulation work.
Here is the insulated pipe with the two tubes within it:
I arbitrarily cut a hole in the mini fridge, pushed into the back corner of the bar, and marked where on the drywall the fridge hole lined up and cut a matching hole there. Then I eyeballed where I wanted the faucet to be and cut a hole up top. This patch of drywall happened to back a built-in bookshelf, and there was only about 3" behind it. To push the thick insulated pipe through the upper hole behind the dry wall, the upper hole had to be quite large. I finally got the pipe through, and had the threads on the elbow just sticking through the bottom hole. I used a threaded nut on the outside of the wall to hold the bottom in place. The top of the pipe rests against a stud that boarders the upper hole:
With the bottom of the pipe attached, I used some pliers to pull the air and beer lines partially through, then pushed the fridge in place. Another threaded coupler on the inside of the fridge attached to the part of the nut that protruded into the fridge, holding the fridge to the wall and pipe. The ends of both tubes hung slack inside the fridge, and the top of the pipe was flush with the plane of the drywall so a faceplate would make a seal:
Now I just need to wait for the piece that connects the beer line to the shank, which I only just ordered after realizing I didn't have one, screw a face plate over the giant upper hole, attach the faucet, and run sanitizer through everything.
I'm almost there!