Opinions, please

The $118 is likely (you MUST check the fine print here!!) for a 5 year lease with no residual value. That is $23.60 per year (ignoring interest costs) or roughly $2 per month. At the end of 5 years, you owe them another $118 if you wish to keep the tanks. This about about the same as the monthly rental charges.

The purchase price on the acetylene is $169-$19 (guess) for a fill or $150 for the tank alone. Since you own the tank, this is YOUR money, it never decreases in value to YOU, but you should charge yourself some interest. Lets say you are really hard nosed and want 10% interest, that is $15 a year. (OK, really it's more like 6% and $9 a year). So buying is a much better financial deal if you keep them for a while.

My supplier has a $0 per year lease, I pay a deposit. They own the tank, I swap when it's empty. I paid around $140 (????) deposit per medium tank, I get my deposit m> I moved from a large city of 2 million to a town of 925. There's a

Leasing tanks usually works best for shops with a high turnover. At the Divers Institute we go through about 100 large O2 bottle a month for underwater burning. We lease the tanks, but we swap them out every month so we carry no long term lease fees. BTW in the volume we are buy, we pay around $5 per bottle for the O2.

Ownership works best if you sit on a set of tanks for many months before swapping.

At South Seattle CC we owned all of our tanks, but it was an added pain in the ass because we had to wait for Airgas to fill OUR tanks and return them. All the tanks were headstamped with the school's name.