Have To Buy Tank For Refill?

I was just pricing out adding 3 more taps to my kegerator and one of the big ticket items was another CO2 tank. My question is, do I have to own a tank before I can go to a gas place and have them fill one up for me? 5# refill is around $18-ish here ... would it be the same if I just say "hey can get 5#'s of CO2", or is there most likely a deposit on their tank?

Conversely, has anyone piggybacked a distributor onto a secondary regulator? Meaning CO2 -> 3 Port Secondary Regulator -> Distributor hooked to one of the regulator ports ... all in all I'd have 5 or 6 cornys hooked up to one 5# tank ... doable?

 

It is called a swap for a reason... it will cost more if you come in without a tank.

And yes you can have 6+ cornies hooked up to a 5# tank. It just won't last as long as it would with only 1-2 cornies. Even then though it should be good for a while.

 

One tank, primary, two secondaries, five taps:

 

Yeah, they're definitely not gonna just toss in a free tank when you buy 5# of CO2. Your cheapest option is definitely going to be to hook your 3 new taps up to the same tank you already have. And frankly, that seems like the easiest option to me too.

If you were going to buy another 5# tank, I'd still hook all the taps up to one tank and that way when it goes empty you can just swap it out, instead of having taps offline until you get your bottle filled. Plus that way you can use the spare for cleaning, sanitizing, etc. (pushing stuff from one corny to another). That's what I do with my spare tank.

 

I just recently priced getting tank from Airgas and Praxair without a swap-out. The cost was about $100 for a 5# without having a tank to swap. I decided to buy me a nice aluminum tank for cheaper and go to a local company that will fill instead of swap.

 

My local welding/CO2 supply shop will lease you a 20# bottle for 1 year for $55. Exchanges/refills are $12. That's what I started out with and that gave me time to find one for cheap on craiglist.