CO2 Charger for Racking?

[High_Noonan]

I have a week to go until my first lager is ready to be racked to the secondary, so I have some time to play around with figuring out how this racking is going to take place.

The lager is sitting in the bottom of a chest freezer in my basement. My 5# CO2 tank is hooked up on the inside of my kegerator up in the garage. Obviously, I do not want to have to monkey around with moving this thing just to get 3PSI for the transfer. That leads me to wonder if I could incorporate a CO2 charger into the carboy cap transfer method.

But rather than a whole CO2 tank and regulator hanging off the high-pressure hose, would a simple CO2 Charger work?
What worries me is the lack of a regulator.
I have never used one of these chargers before, so I don't know exactly how they work.
Can I just hit it enough to get the lager moving, or is it simply going to dump the whole contents of the cylinder at once? I've read that these things can have a very high pressure on them.
Any ideas?

 

[mikeysab]

You can put a little in, or the whole cartridge. It would probably work fine. If you give it a little shot to get things going, then when tne flow slows, give it another short shot. I would imagine if you dumped the whole cartridge in, if the carboy cap could handle the pressure, you'd be fine, but I could be wrong. Also, shooting the whole cart in could stir up the trub, so its probably not a great idea. Play with it, whats the worst that could happen?

 

[shelly_belly]

Usually, if you put too much pressure in the carboy, the lid blows off forcing you to start over. If your pushing uphill the beer will return to the carboy and stir up the sediment. The better bottles will expand quite a bit though, giving you a little leeway. Personally, I would use the CO2 bottle and regulator for better control. I put regular air compressor quick disconnect fittings on all of my regulators just for this reason.

 

[High_Noonan]

Thanks for the input, folks.
I was hoping that you could just squeeze a bit of gas at a time from the charger and this seems to be the case.
If worse comes to worst, I will grab the CO2 tank and regulator.