Than you

We have a pretty efficient fill station. We're super proud of it. It's been a ton of work between myself, J.D., and our service manager Nick. I would put it up there against literally anyone's. Super high volume operations in tourist areas definitely may have an edge in us, but ours also can be scaled up and down depending on demand.

We swage our own pipe, have redundant systems for our redundant systems, and have built it to cater to single high pressure fill, or filling commercial diving operations trimix bottles for use on saturation projects. It's very rad, very effective, and very involved.

On a normal day, we can fill 30-40 HP tanks with minimal warning, in about an hour. 1-10 HP fills can be done off banks alone, if we're not going to run our compressors, and they will end full.

Our baseline cost of maintaining this month-to-month is about $800 in electric, $400 in filters, and $400 in staff time, if we're only counting maintenance and upkeep (and not operation). The hardware/compressors/boosters/piping on our fill station breaks out at fractionally less than $80k, if you don't factor in knowledge, learning curves, mistakes, know-how, the fact we're on DAK Fill Station 5.0, yadayadayada.

Bitching about a couple dollars if you have access to a decent fill station is beyond silly. But if they're trying to take you for a ride, then absolutely ditch them.

It's super cheap to fill your own tanks. For a couple dozen hours of research and $5k max, you can be your own master of fills. So, just do that. If I didn't work at a shop, I'd spend $5-7,000 and never have to worry about it. It's too easy to pull off, and not worth whining about it.