olie
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Hey all -- I'm looking at CO2 systems, and not quite understanding the units.
How many (5gal) kegs' worth of force-carbonation is 5lb of CO2? Assume 2.5 volumes per.
How many kegs (or pints or however you care to measure -- just tell me the units! ) of pressurized pour is 5lb of CO2?
Everyone sells CO2 tanks by the lb, but I have no sense at all about how much a pound of CO2 is.
And before you answer "more than you'll need for your home-brewing needs", don't assume that I brew at the same rate as everyone else. <G> I'm interested in moving toward a nano-brewery but, for now, let's just imagine that I brew, force carbonate and tap a 5lb keg every week.
(I don't, yet, but I'm looking to size my system to handle that. Once I'm there, I'll be looking to upgrade everything but, for now, I'm just trying to get a sense of "how much is that?!" at the 1/6-keg-a-week scale, to help me think about future directions.)
It seems to me that a 20# tank doesn't cost significantly more than a 5# one (certainly not 4x!), so the long-term cheapskate in me says go that route. But I don't know how much CO2 is 20# either, other than that it's 4x as much as 5#, which I don't know how much that is!
Tangent: when one speaks of "2.5 volumes of CO2", do they mean that 5gal x 2.5 = 12.5 gallons of CO2 (at STP, I assume) gets desolved into 5 gallons of liquid beer? Or does it mean something else? 1 gallon is 0.133681 cubic feet, so 12.5 gallons of air (CO2) would be just over 1.67 cu.ft. If I knew that 5# was, say, 50 cu.ft., I could do the math, but I don't know that, either.
Semi-self-answer: aha! Over on some grow site, I found this: "a pound of liquid CO2 in a tank contains 8.741 cubic feet of gas" (5# = 43.7 -- my guess was close!), so now I'm just looking for verification of the meaning of "X-volumes of CO2".
How many (5gal) kegs' worth of force-carbonation is 5lb of CO2? Assume 2.5 volumes per.
How many kegs (or pints or however you care to measure -- just tell me the units! ) of pressurized pour is 5lb of CO2?
Everyone sells CO2 tanks by the lb, but I have no sense at all about how much a pound of CO2 is.
And before you answer "more than you'll need for your home-brewing needs", don't assume that I brew at the same rate as everyone else. <G> I'm interested in moving toward a nano-brewery but, for now, let's just imagine that I brew, force carbonate and tap a 5lb keg every week.
(I don't, yet, but I'm looking to size my system to handle that. Once I'm there, I'll be looking to upgrade everything but, for now, I'm just trying to get a sense of "how much is that?!" at the 1/6-keg-a-week scale, to help me think about future directions.)
It seems to me that a 20# tank doesn't cost significantly more than a 5# one (certainly not 4x!), so the long-term cheapskate in me says go that route. But I don't know how much CO2 is 20# either, other than that it's 4x as much as 5#, which I don't know how much that is!
Tangent: when one speaks of "2.5 volumes of CO2", do they mean that 5gal x 2.5 = 12.5 gallons of CO2 (at STP, I assume) gets desolved into 5 gallons of liquid beer? Or does it mean something else? 1 gallon is 0.133681 cubic feet, so 12.5 gallons of air (CO2) would be just over 1.67 cu.ft. If I knew that 5# was, say, 50 cu.ft., I could do the math, but I don't know that, either.
Semi-self-answer: aha! Over on some grow site, I found this: "a pound of liquid CO2 in a tank contains 8.741 cubic feet of gas" (5# = 43.7 -- my guess was close!), so now I'm just looking for verification of the meaning of "X-volumes of CO2".
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