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beer gas
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beer gas
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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At an old job a manager who usually never set foot behind the bar or in the kitchen decided to help and change out the beer gas tank. He got the tanks mixed up and I saw him lifting one in each hand to try to tell the difference by weight. While Co2 is heavier than air, you arent gonna be able to tell the difference by lifting each tank and comparing
really? i thought there'd be a noticeable difference between a full and empty tank. Like a 20lb tank holds 20lbs of co2, which you could definitely tell by hand. Now if they were trying to discern between varying levels of full, then yeah good luck.
The tank itself is really heavy, thicc metal
A full tank is usually still at least twice as heavy as an empty one. Even if the tank is built heavy, that just means there is also likely more pressure in it.
I don't think CO2 liquifies in the bottle (like many other gases), so you can't just slosh it around and listen. You need to go through weight.
It definitely liquefies under pressures needed to fill these cylinders. I don't have a regulator here, but exit pressures are around 900psi unregulated.
I was using it straight from the bottle unregulated to flush a bunch of iron sediment out of a 300' long loop of 1-1/2 and 2" hot water lines after I rehabbed and put back into service a 70 year old hot water storage tank. The tank had a bunch of tubercule buildup and ended up in the return line, killing pressure.
Incidentally during this visit I fried a 6,000 dollar variable frequency drive for the air handler when I got a slug of water to shoot out of the cut open plumbing about 10' across a room and hose down the unprotected VFD.
Whoops.
I just doublechecked and it's quite interesting. CO2 only liquifies under high pressure in a certain temperature range. Above its critical point at around 31°C it can't be liquified anymore.
The wimdow where it is liquid is much smaller when compared to most other gasses.
The larger the canister, the higher the ratio of gas to container weight. The canister on the pic should be around 15kg of gas. Based on other similar canisters, the canister should weigh around 40kg when full. That makes the weight ratio about 3:5.
But for smaller canisters, for example this 1.5kg canister, the weight ratio drops to about 3:7.
You should still be able to easily tell the difference between empty and full, I was just interested in the gas to container weight ratios
Correct. I went and looked at both my 20lb'ers I'm carrying. Tare weight is 23.5lbs, filled weight is 43.5lbs. It's 20lbs of gas plus the vessel weight. A full tank is approx 2x heavy as a empty.