I have an old kegerator, but I haven't used it in years; on plugging it in it seems to run constantly and maxes out (er, mins out?) at 46 deg F, which is fine for beer (so probably working okay), but not as cold as I'd like to have my fizzy water. Currently using, and frequently cursing, a Sodastream. I will be excited to see the end of it, and I'm not sure whether that's more because it's a piece of crap that probably leaks half its CO2 and fails to fizz to a consistent level or because after being back on name-brand gas cylinders (after having done the whole adapter thing previously) we're paying more for gas than canned bubbly water would cost, or at least about the same...
I only plan to have beer in it every now and then, and can live with turning the temp up a bit, or maybe I can come up with some clever way of adding an extra keg-contact cooler to the water keg so it's down at just-above-ice while the beer is closer to a moderately enthusiastic Lucas fridge for my ESB or Kentish Strong Ale... 
Anyhow, just wondering if anybody has any any recommendations or warnings when it comes to kegerator brands. You can get them all the way down to pretty cheap, and I suspect I know what that's like... I feel like I've heard good things about morebeer.com and they have both a neat article on doing plumbed sparking water, and carry KOMOS kegerators (I'm looking at the two-faucet model, obvs.) which look to be lower-middling (once we rule out cheap crap) priced with nice, name-brand stainless (important for water) faucets. I think their article is the tidiest solution I've seen, and I really like that it's constant and not one where I have to ever swap kegs or wait a while for one to carbonate. Ease is important here.
There are a couple of decent-looking, newer-than-mine kegerators on local CL, but I really, really don't want to turn this into any more project than is necessary, or do it again any time soon.
So, yeah... Brand experiences? Similar setups?
Doing sparkling water in a kegerator is a PITA. We've tried hard seltzers at our bar, and they do not work well. It's not brand per-se, but there are a lot of factors that are going to change things.
To taste right, seltzer has a MUCH higher proportion of dissolved CO2 (typically 3-4 volumes) than a beer typically does (typically 2-2.5 volumes). It also doesn't have dissolved sugars and proteins that help hold it in suspension.
If you really want to do it, you want to be able to hold it consistently at just above freezing. That is really really hard in a small air-cooled space. You're going to end up with very uneven cooling. You'll want a fair amount of buffer space between your cooling element and your product.
You also will need to hold a lot of restriction on the product line. The longer and narrower your feed line to the faucet, the better.
You then need to pair it with a shank and a faucet that don't suddenly and turbulently relieve that restriction. Don't have real guidance on that.
In reply to Beer Baron 🍺 :
Does all that still apply if he's carbonating the water on the fly and not storing/dispensing pre-made seltzer? That's what he's linked to, a carbonator that goes on top of a keg. So you'd have a tank of co2 and a keg of cold water that only gets carbonated at the point of use. I'm impressed to see a $70 carbonator, I may have to think about that for home. We also have a sodastream and have a love/hate relationship with it.
dculberson said:
In reply to Beer Baron 🍺 :
Does all that still apply if he's carbonating the water on the fly and not storing/dispensing pre-made seltzer? That's what he's linked to, a carbonator that goes on top of a keg. So you'd have a tank of co2 and a keg of cold water that only gets carbonated at the point of use. I'm impressed to see a $70 carbonator, I may have to think about that for home. We also have a sodastream and have a love/hate relationship with it.
Beer Baron is spot on with his input, but to add on to this tidbit- I'd assume it'd be of similar quality to a sodastream with an inline carbonator. Some people are cool with sodastream levels of carbonation (2ish Volumes), but if he's trying to get Polar/Bubly/Canned/Off the shelf seltzer-type flavors and mouthfeel (4+Vol), he's gonna be disappointed. Seltzer is a fickle beast in package, and typically you need to be right at the working mechanical limits of kegs and lines in order to serve 'real' seltzer, which is why it's such a challenge. and then, to prevent your friend from taking seltzter baths every time he cracks the faucet, you'd need a ton of line restriction. My handy dandy book calculator on my desk says that, at 4 volumes of carbonation in liquid, at 36 degrees, and 10-12psi of push gas (the gas just required to push the liquid out of the keg), you're looking at 11' of 1/8"ID beer line... That's... a lot, haha.
But yeah, if he digs lower bubbles, that carbonator in a standard kegerator would work totally fine.
I'm okay with the carbonation level from my Sodastream (when it works correctly), but it does look like at the 30psi that how-to guide gives, I should be able to get 4 volumes even up at 40 degrees F, at least according to this chart (and of course all real-world applications will behave like the chart, right?) Some odds and ends appear to get updated/uprated in order for everything to be happy at this above-beer CO2 pressure. (EDIT: Sloppy; that's sitting on carbonation; not sure how that compares to the carbonator, and I'm still getting my head around the fact that that actually appears to do anything more than manage water flow control; I originally though we *were* just pressurizing the keg...)
https://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table/ (EDIT: wonder where this lands with regard to BB's observation about lack of suspended stuff that helps with holding CO2)
That makes me happy, though it doesn't address the bummer that I prefer my water very cold and beer a little less so...
The flow-control faucets may do part of the job, as they're intended to allow you to jump to beers which want different levels of carbonation without rejiggering your hoses, but everything has its limitations. I guess I can cross my fingers that a long line from the carbonator to the faucet will reduce the job of the faucet in dispensing well?
Beer Baron's answer sent me back to looking at chill plates and powered carbonators and just leaving my kegerator as an occasional-use beer thing while moving the constant-use fizzy water to a separate answer. Perhaps I'll still try to figure out whether that's a better option, though it looks to be expensive and hard to package. Having it right in the kitchen would be nice (the kegerator lives in the "utility room" which is still quite nearby).
In reply to dculberson :
Keeping it sufficiently cold will still be an issue. Line length isn't really an issue.
Faucet and shank fittings will likely still matter a lot.
