CO2 usage over time, or the costs of kegging...

[karlp]

People on the ninternet give all sorts of examples of how many kegs they get per gas bottle, and so on, but it always seems a little bit rough. Since I keep receipts for things, even though I almost never look at them again, I thought I might actually have a look at my real usage.

I use the gas to force carbonate, and also to help with cleaning. I pressurize kegs to push cleaning fluid through both the keg dip tubes, and also to push cleaning fluid through the beer tap lines on the fridge. I have occasionally had leaks, and this is included in my costs...

Since October 2007, I average 255 days between refills, on a 5kg keg. (six refills) I've had two times only 150 days or so, both the first fillup (finding the initial leaks) and after moving house (finding the leaks after breaking the whole thing down and building it up again)

That's an average cost per year, with all fillups at http://www.kolsyra.is/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; of 5028 ISK / year. Their prices have risen at ~7.5% per year, which is pretty much inline with my memories of inflation over the last 4 years.

Ahh, but how much beer is that?! My notes tell me 48 batches that went into kegs, or, 439kr/keg. YMMV

If anyone's _realllly_ curious, I can put up the spreadsheet for this. (Why did I even do this? Well, I was waiting for the wort to cool down)

[atax1c]

Have you checked how many kegs you can go through on a single CO2 tank ?

I have the typical 5lb tank and I'm on my forth keg and I would guess that I'm about half way through it.

[karlp]

Well, the information was all there

6 fills, 48 kegs, that's only 8 kegs per bottle. My gas bottle is a 5kg bottle. I may have a leak that I don't know about. Using the gas to help clean may use a lot of gas. *shrugs* I did have two known leak problems though, that dramatically shortened the life of two of those fills. Maybe it's more like 12 kegs per bottle?