Beginner's guide to equipment. Subject: Tanks
article by Young Choi

This is the third installment of our Beginner’s Guide to Equipment. The first installment featured the most important piece of gear in your kit and that was the paintball mask/goggle. In the second installment, we featured some suggestions on great and inexpensive paintball guns. This installment will feature your air source, tank, or bottle (what ever you want to call it).

In paintball there are two main gas sources to make your paintball gun cycle and ultimately launch a paintball down range. Co2 is the most common air source that the vast majority of you all will use. Co2 tanks/bottles come in different sizes and are all pretty much the same. They all have pin valves, some may even have a fixed on/off valve to degas the paintball gun. These tanks are refillable. Co2 is readily available at almost every paintball store/field that I have ever been to. Co2 can be obtained most anywhere as it is also used by welders (and we all know that welders are everywhere).

Co2 is what I would call an inconsistent air source for paintball guns. Depending on different variables like temperature and if a user is shooting long bursts of paint, Co2 pressure output can range from 400 psi up to 1200 psi. For the most part on a 75 degree day, Co2 will pump out about 800 psi.

The main diversity of Co2 tanks/bottles is the size and material used to make the bottle. Aluminum and steel are the materials that tanks/bottles are made from. I prefer aluminum tanks over steel just for the weight factor as steel is a heavier metal.

Common sizes for paintball are the 9, 12, 16, and 20 oz. Co2 is filled via weight and the oz number correlates to how much Co2 a tank is capable of holding. The larger the tank, the heavier your paintball gun setup will be.

12 Grams

12 gram Co2 cartridges are non-refillable. These are the same cartridges used for many BB guns. A 12 gram cartridge will get you about 12 shots from most of the guns introduced in the second installment of the Beginner’s Guide to Equipment.

9 oz tank

9 oz tanks will get you about 400 shots from most of the guns introduced in the second installment of the Beginner’s Guide to Equipment.

12 oz tank

12 oz tanks will get you about 600 shots from most of the guns introduced in the second installment of the Beginner’s Guide to Equipment.

16 oz tank

16 oz tanks will get you about 800 shots from most of the guns introduced in the second installment of the Beginner’s Guide to Equipment.

20 oz tank

20 oz tanks will get you about 1000 shots from most of the guns introduced in the second installment of the Beginner’s Guide to Equipment.

The other air source for paintball comes in many aliases: HPA, High Pressure Air, Nitro, Nitrogen, and Compressed Air. All these terms are synonymous when it comes to paintball. So for the purpose of paintball these terms are pretty much the same. For the purpose of this section, I’ll use the term HPA in reference of this air source.

HPA tanks are heavier than Co2, more expensive, and in some places harder to obtain refills in some locations. The HPA tanks made of aluminum or steel are heavier than Co2 tanks due to the fact that HPA tanks are filled with highly compressed air (3000 psi) so the tanks have to be stronger to sustain those extreme pressures.

50 CI 3000 HPA Tank

HPA tanks cost more than Co2 tanks due to the regulator built into it. All HPA tanks have some sort of regulator to regulate the pressure in the bottle down to a manageable 800 psi that most markers in the lower price range can handle. Regulators alone can cost in the $50 to $200 range, the regulator is the most expensive component on an HPA tank.

68 CI 3000 HPA Tank

The more expensive HPA tanks will have a carbon fiber spun bottle. These bottles are capable of holding up to 4500 psi (some are even capable of 5000 psi) yet weigh less than a filled 9 oz Co2 tank. These systems will break the $150 barrier easy and may not be in the price range that a new player will want to invest in.

To fill an HPA tank, you will need a heavy duty compressor that is only common in dive shops. Your little compressor that is in the garage to power your air tools won’t even generate enough pressure to launch a ball out of the barrel. Accessibility for most of you that don’t have a resource for High Pressure Air fills may just want to stick with Co2.

Since High Pressure Air is not hampered by temperature like Co2. The output pressure will remain consistent till the level of air pressure gets below the output pressure (between 450 psi to 800 psi).

Well that’s it for this installment. Stay tuned next week when we go over Loaders/Hopper.