Posted by Eins on February 12, 2002 at 07:55:23:
In Reply to: Hot fills vs. cold fills posted by c2cDiver on February 09, 2002 at 01:20:26:
the question is not whether a hot fill is better than a cold fill (cold being better, of course) but whether a wet fill is better than a dry fill. AFAIK, the current thinking is that wet fills carry the risk of "contamination", meaning water getting into the tank by accident, either from a fill whip that fell into the tank and still contains some water drops, or from the tank valve if that went under. Another train of thought is that, unless you really refrigerate the water, it won't do much good in helping a proper (= cold) fill.
IMHO, they could be using the water contamination argument as an excuse to avoid the high (energy) cost of providing truely refrigerated fills.
Unfortunately, a fill slow enough to not heat up the tank has got to be VERY VERY slow, like in 30 minutes or so per tank. Al tanks are better for this as the Al has better heat conductivity/dissipation than steel and therefore cools down the hot air faster.
Arno