Kidde I-valve

Try a local fire extinguisher company (Yellow Pages). They should be able to help you find something to adapt the valve to something a little more "normal".

Jim

I salvaged a couple of smaller fire extinguishers. The valves had standard pipe theads.

Dan

The big problem you can't avoid is that a fire extinguisher valve is a dip-tube dump type, since to put out a fire you want as much directed mass flow as possible. Connecting an ordinary gas regulator to this liquid CO2 is asking for disaster.

Another warning is to not improvise high-pressure gas fittings unless you can analyze and prove the strength of your work. Absolutely do not use plumbing fittings. You do not want 75 lbs of liquid CO2 at 1000 psi held in by a Chinese shrapnel tube designed to explode at 150 psi.

Calculate the joules represented by the containment of 75 lbs of CO2 as warm liquid. Now divide that by, say, the 5 seconds it takes to vent a burst high-pressure dip-tube line, to get watts, and thence to horsepower. Humble yourself before that figure. If you don't have the brains to make that kind of calculation, then you shouldn't be messing with this material.

It is rather like a 750 KV power line fell into your back yard. Let's just connect a transformer with some alligator clips to get some free power. Whee!

Sure you can avoid it: turn the tank upside down. Bob

No reason to get condescending, but based on some of the questions I have seen on this forum, no offense is taken. I have very high levels of respect for compressed gases.

I was just hoping that there would be some reasonably cheap method to adapt the plumbing of this setup. The "correct" I valve hood is ~$150 (more than the CO2 I'm attempting to salvage) There may be cheaper sources. Worst case, I just dump the CO2 someplace vented and move on with life...

JW

I'd make an active effort to donate the co2 to someplace, rather than vent it. No sense wasting all the energy and effort it took to manufacture.

Not that venting will have much effect on the planet, one way or the other.

I found the "I-valve recharge adapter" online, and that should be usable to drain the tank - the trick is to borrow one from an extinguisher service company that has two and rarely uses them. Not that many permanent mount CO2 systems out there anymore, most of them are dry-chemical or wet-chemical, and they only need a small 1-pound CO2 or Nitrogen cylinder to discharge the agent.

Then call your friend that owns a restaurant - I'm sure they'll be overjoyed to accept the donation of a few large cylinders of CO2, it'll cut their refill bill from the industrial gases company delivering the cryogenic CO2 to their dewar tank.

All of those restaurant systems have a changeover valve to use cylinder CO2 if the cryogenic dewar runs dry, just switch it over manually - when the cylinder goes dry, they can switch it back till you come by and hook up another one. And with the Bag-in-Box pumps sucking up the gas, they use it up at a pretty good clip...

(Hint: Offer to set the restaurant up with a small air compressor and a good inline filtration system to run the Bag-in-Box pumps. Or run a line and tap off an existing HVAC Control Air or Shop Air system. The way those little diaphraghm pumps suck down the gas just to move the syrup 10 feet, it will pay for itself fast.)

In a few weeks the CO2 cylinders are emptied responsibly and you get a few free meals from the restaurant in return. Then you take the I-Valve adapter back to the extinguisher shop and buy a few good

2-1/2-Pound ABC Units from them for your car as the rental payment. Everybody wins.

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Don't worry about getting Coca-Cola to pony up on the deposits - they are worth more than that nowadays, it would be a sucker lowball payment. Consider them owner cylinders.

With the prevalence of Cryo CO2 Dewars in the market, they don't have nearly the demand anymore in the soda biz. They can run for decades on what they have, now that they only get used as a backup supply most places.

And consider that the cylinders may have been in the trash because they failed Hydro. Not likely, because they would drill a hole in the side to make sure they cant be used again, but you never know.

I would clean them thoroughly and check the head-stamps for clues. If they XXX'd out the registration numbers, that might be a fail sign. And if they are beaten up too bad they would fail on visual - remember Aluminum likes to fail catastrophically by developing fractures...

Then take the cleaned up bottles to a welding supply and send them through for a Hydro and CO2 fill - you'll get them back, or you won't.

The big question being - if one or more fails Hydro, do you get it back? And do they stick you with the test fee? And is the recycling value higher than the test fee? (Probably is, they use a high-grade forging alloy...)

I would be VERY wary if they don't send the failed cylinder back and try to bill you for the test anyway - they might be trying to get paid twice for the same job (by you and by the recycling center) which is always nice IF you don't get caught...

I had an old Coca-Cola tank like that, and my Refrigeration house at the time just did a straight exchange for the fill cost, they didn't worry about it's parentage.

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