It has been a frustrating few weeks and I'm beginning to wonder if I will get the cellar and bar sorted before Christmas.

With the poor diagnosis on the glycol chiller I thought I would try a cheap new freezer as the chilling plant. I found a cheap brand 80 litre upright freezer and bought one via ebay as a factory second.

When I looked inside I was surprised to see that the shelves were part of the cooling coils - that is there was no cooling in the walls of the freezer, but rather each shelf was fixed with coolant lines. It meant that it was never going to work. Anyway, it gave a starting point to test the theory that a freezer could really be used as glycol chilling plant.

The bottom plastic tray had a capacity of around 12 litres, so a glycol/water mix was put into the freezer with the controller's temperature probe. It took a day or so for the temperature to drop to around 0 degrees C, at which point I turned on the font pump to see what would happen.

The font got cold and began to drip with condensation, but before long the font had sucked the cold from the glycol and the freezer could not cope with such a simple demand.

I decided it was time to move to a chest freezer, so another ebay search ...

... and I ended up with a nice little 150 litre chest freezer. So this was loaded with 22 litres of glycol/water and I waited to see what would happen.

I am not a refrigeration mechanic so I don't really know how much cooling power units like this should have - for me it is simply guesswork. I also don't know how a freezer might compare to an average refrigerator, although I have successfully used a glycol bath in the freezer compartment of a keg fridge to flood the font. So I waited and watched the temperature slowly lower on the glycol bath in the second freezer. But one day ran into another and then after half the week had passed the glycol had only dropped to about 10 C. I began to wonder if the thermal mass of glycol was too great for a domestic freezer to deal with.

One evening I had a few spare minutes (a bit of a luxury at this time of year) and so I installed a fan to recirculate cold air and an agitator to stir up the glycol. I was shocked the next morning to see that these things had added sufficient heat for the glycol to be sitting at 22C next morning

Ok, so something is really wrong here. Finally yesterday I had the chance to do a proper test on the chest freezer. I bought some bags of ice and placed them in the freezer with the temperature probe to see what would happen. The glycol bath was removed. The temperature settled at -1.7 degrees C and then over the next 12 hours settled out to near enough 0 C or freezing point. Damn, the second freezer is also a lemon

Oh well, there is at least some good news. I was given an ebay refund the same day - much better than other ebay experiences I've had recently.

So I'm on the lookout for a chest freezer that actually works to test again if this is at all feasible. I'm getting ebay fatigue at this rate ...

If all else fails, I will pack my beer coils with ice for our new year party - a giant miracle box - so at least the bar will be functional for the patrons.