Fill station

When filling your own co2 (20oz tank) when do you know when the tanks full? The gauge went to 800 and stopped. (Do not have a scale)

 

Filling CO2 requires a scale, if you don't have a scale, do not attempt to fill a CO2 canister as overfilling can cause structural failure of the valve or the cylinder itself resulting in serious injury or death.

A proper CO2 fill station uses siphon or "dip tube" valved CO2 tanks, a ball-valve fill station with bleed-off fill adapter or bleed-off inline valve, and a simple electronic scale capable of measuring in ounces or fractions of an ounce. Fish scales are excellent for this as they are cheap and self-calibrate.


To properly fill CO2, you must start with at least a little CO2 left in the tank. You bleed that CO2 off to chill the bottle down and keep the incoming CO2 from expanding rapidly which will keep liquid CO2 from flowing into the bottle. Once the bleed-off is completed, you hang the bottle on the scale and tare the scale so it reads 0. Then you may start filling. Fill to 1/2oz under the max fill capacity (19.5oz for a 20oz tank for example) to allow room for error and expansion. Close the fill adapter and bleed off the line pressure.

Overfilling is EXTREMELY dangerous. In the event that your valve is loc-tited into the bottle and the thread-locking product has blocked the safety-valve where the burst disk sits, the valve can fail. The bottle can also fail if improperly cared for and over-pressurized.

They're like $10 at walmart in the fishing/hunting/paintball section. I'm a bit zealous in the fill-station procedure area as I had a few people really screw some things up when I was working in a pro-shop. Had the whip from a ACI Bulldog fill-station fly off and whack me in the skull at one point because some idiot who worked in the store thought that quick-disconnects were fun to play with and didn't re-seat it properly. 120+mph steel fitting to the side of the head = hours in an MRI just to make sure you don't die.

Also, there have been a few incidents of bad-valves in CO2 tanks that have caused at least one death and multiple injuries in over-pressurization cases.