OK. Only vaguely metalworking related, but not at all political.
I left the valves on my oxy-acetelyne rig on for a week a couple of months ago. Aside from the fact that I stupidly wasted a bunch of money (at least they were the little tanks, and one was nearly empty), I also have found myself _constantly_ thinking of all the jobs that I can _only_ do with that rig, even though I didn't need to do any of them for months.
So, at any rate, my model airplane club's lawn roller broke, it needs welding and some brackets -- flame cut, of course -- to make it happy again. So OF COURSE I had to run down and get gas.
Whee hee! I can ignore all those welding jobs with impunity now, because I can do them any time I want, now!
I've never undersood why, but one of my tanks always quits shortly after noon on saturday in the middle of a hot job. The tank place closes at noon saturday till Monday morning.
What, you don't have a store-room with a tank of each stashed away? At least empties, waiting for a tank to get down to 1/4 full?
Tsk tsk.
When my dad's shop was still doing active custom auto body work -- which meant lots of O-A welding -- there would be two OA sets always ready to run, and if there weren't a fresh pair of tanks in the storeroom, then someone would be scheduled to go to Landeen Welding and get more.
I use less than a bottle full per year (but keeping it helps for unexpected jobs) but for that privilege I am charged $362.47 rental per annum on the bottles in Australia.
Hmm ... no option to buy your own (perhaps smaller) tanks, and just pay for the refill?
I don't use O-A (yet) but I do use Argon for TIG welding, and for my purposes, two of the smallest of the tanks work out well. I have a spare to swap in if I run out on a weekend during a project, and the empty one goes back and is swapped for another tank already filled for a fairly reasonable fee.
Yes, if I had the full sized tanks, I could only rent them, but the smaller ones (at least here in VA in the USA) can either be rented or become "owner bottles". Essentially, they have recorded that you own whatever number of bottles, so the swap goes smoothly. (And the fellow behind the counter even remembers me when I pop back in -- for all that I have been using it for less than a year now.)
I got the TIG setup at our metalworking club's annual yard sale and picnic for little enough so I figured that it was time to start learning to use it. The initial purchase of each bottle, interestingly, comes with no charge for the Argon in it.
I already had a good two-stage NOS inert gas regulator, picked up earlier in the year at a hamfest (UK call it a "Radio Rally" -- a multi-party (mostly) electronics yard sale spread over quite a bit of space -- usually at some fairground. I've gotten other interesting metalworking tools at hamfests as well.
I figured that I would eventually go for TIG welding, so I expected to use the regulator -- and it was not that long after I got it that I got the welder. Only real disadvantage of the cheap Harbor Freight welder is that it is DC only, so not suitable for welding aluminum. Well ... the first couple of projects were better in steel anyway. :-) Maybe someday I'll spring for a somewhat larger welder which can handle aluminum as well, now that I know that I *can* weld, not yet pretty, but satisfactory for strength.
No options, can not own acetylene bottles, only option is to rent bottles You can own co2 bottles and refill can own some lpg bottles but not the normal size used to run domestic cooking and heating,have to rent these. Although you can own giant LPG bottles for this purpose.
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