Broken keezer.

[Randomnoob]

About six months ago I bought a used keezer from a guy who had stopped homebrewing and who has since moved about 1200 miles away. It worked great for about 5 months until Mother's Day when I went to pour myself a beer from it and it was room temperature warm. I plugged it in without the Johnson Controller and heard the freezer running but after seven or eight hours it hadn't got any cooler. I figured it must be broken. So then I figured that I would just get another 5.0 Cubic Foot Chest Freezer and I would just take out the old one and put a new one in its place. So this weekend I bought a new chest freezer and yeah, it doesn't fit in the keezer box that the previous owner made. So I went online to look at the models at different local stores and none of them are the same size as the old keezer.

In general, would this be something that a local appliance store could easily and cheaply repair or am I totally screwed?

 

[day_trippr]

The odds are repair would be neither easy nor cheap. There's a leak somewhere - could be the evap loop has rusted out or there's a blown compressor seal - that let the magic out.

Unless you know someone with the equipment to purge the system, do a vacuum test, then start looking for the leak, I'd be surprised if a tech wouldn't tell you $200 just to figure out what's likely wrong. If it's the evap loop rusted out, it's unfixable; if it's the compressor, you're looking at another couple hundred bucks to replace it and recharge the system...

 

[germanicus81]

I had the same problem back in February. My keezer died in the same way, and I found that the dimensions of the coffin top for my 11 year old ~7 cu. ft did not match any of the currently available models. I ended up stripping out all of the useful parts and getting a used 18 cu. ft refrigerator. I've got 4 taps, room for 5 kegs if I squeeze em in, tons of door storage for bottles, and a freezer for hops. Oh yeah, and I don't need to have a tub of Damp Rid in there to avoid condensation and mold. Win-win-win.