Welding gas cost UK: cartridge, deposit or empty shell

You have a Saturday bracket to finish, the MIG is already on the bench, and the gas is the line that stops the job. On amazon.co.uk in this comparison set a disposable sits at £17.99, a filled 8 litre cylinder sits at £169.99, and a steel shell sits at £306.07. Those three stickers are the welding gas cost UK buyers compare, and they are bills for different objects: a short cartridge, a stated fill plus a mini regulator, and a container the listing says arrives empty.

The 60 litre figure on the cheapest bottle divides to about four minutes at a continuous 15 litres a minute. UK reviews on that bottle talk about 5 to 20 minutes of welding. An afternoon of seams is the wrong job for £17.99. The figures below come from the argon gas cylinder comparison files, eight amazon.co.uk shelf prices kept as printed. For one short mild-steel session with an unstated mix, the SWP WG/1368 at £17.99 is the top pick in that comparison.

In short

A £17.99 disposable and a £169.99 filled bottle are about 9.4 times apart in money and about 20 times apart in stated litres. A £306.07 listing in the same set is an empty CGA580 shell. A cylinder deposit of £70, £110 or £190, on Hobbyweld’s FAQ, is a third bill, and the gas fill sits on top of it.

What the stickers actually buy

A disposable is a small canister you finish and then recycle or throw away. An exchange cylinder is a container you hold against a deposit, then swap or refill. An empty shell is steel and a valve, with the gas still to source.

The SWP WG/1368 is £17.99, stated as 60 litres of argon/CO2 with the ratio unprinted, 1.28 kg, and 4.6 from 160 reviews. Sealey’s MIG/ARG/100 is £31.68 for argon at 60 litres and 100 g. Sealey’s MIG/MIX/100 is £32.11 for a stated 80% argon and 20% CO2, again 60 litres and 100 g. Sealey’s MIGMIX2.2 is £57.17 for 430 g, with 2.2 litres printed beside that mass, as an 84/16 mix. The four-pack, MIGMIX2.24, is £192.57. BricoLoco’s disposable is £78.29 for a stated 1 litre of 86/14.

The Gray Eagle 8 litre bottle is £169.99. The listing states 1.2 cubic metres of 82% argon and 18% CO2 at 150 bar, says the cylinder ships full, and includes a mini regulator. The outlet is L 21.8 × 1/14, which the file does not call BS 341 No. 3, and there is no review line. The £306.07 product is the 60STEEL-580-A. It ships empty, rated at 60 cubic feet and 13.2 kg, with a CGA580 valve and a 3/4 inch NGT inlet, a North American argon connection. A DOT-approved bullet is on the page. This comparison has no UK fill price for that shell. Adams Gas describes disposables around 0.95 litres and 2.2 litres and makes a no-rental case. That labels bottle size. It is not an amazon price, and it does not turn 430 g into welding litres.

Minutes in a 60 litre bottle

Divide 60 litres by 15 litres a minute and you get four minutes of continuous gas. BOC’s shielding-gas brochure uses that same flow when it says a 50 litre cylinder of about 10 cubic metres lasts about 11 hours. About 10 cubic metres is roughly 167 times a 60 litre cartridge. The brochure is a scale check, not a price.

Reviews on the £17.99 SWP bottle describe about 5 to 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes, and about 20 minutes of welding, above the four-minute sum because trigger time includes pauses and often a lower flow. Once the bead passes a quarter of an hour, budget another cartridge or a filled cylinder. Sealey prints about one hour on the 60 litre argon and 80/20 disposables. On the MIG/ARG/100, 3.7 from 16 reviews, one review says a bottle arrived empty and lasted two or three minutes. On the MIG/MIX/100, 3.4 from five reviews, a review says two bottles ran out on car arches. Keep the hour as the seller’s approximate ceiling.

The SWP file does not name the outlet thread. One UK review said the fitting was smaller than a normal regulator, a 4 mm hose against an 8 mm hose. An adaptor is unpriced in this set. If your regulator is BS 341 No. 3, the Gray Eagle’s L 21.8 × 1/14 is a compatibility check, even though that bundle includes a mini regulator. You cannot file the SWP as 80/20. On a TIG welding machine used for aluminium, a mild-steel mix is the wrong family however low the sticker. Outdoors, flux-cored wire skips the bottle, with its own fume and bead appearance.

What an argon cylinder deposit buys

A deposit is money left against the cylinder, not a payment for the gas inside it. Hobbyweld’s FAQ lists £70, £110 and £190 for its high-pressure sizes and presents that model as free of monthly rental. The fill price is not in that FAQ block. Express Gases lists a Hobbyweld 5 at £57 with 1.40 cubic metres. Gas Shack lists Hobbyweld from £57. Both are supplier pages, not amazon.co.uk stickers. Before you set £57 against £169.99, read whether the deposit is added at checkout and whether £57 is the gas, the exchange, or a headline.

An older MIG-welding.co.uk thread quotes about £170 to £213 including VAT to start a small exchange cylinder, deposit and regulator included. That is a forum quote, not a 2026 tariff. On exchange the cylinder goes back. The £306.07 shell ships empty on CGA580, and a filler who only handles BS 341 may refuse it. Until a supplier agrees to fill that valve, the money has bought an empty cylinder.

A worked shelf-price comparison

These figures will move. They still stop the £17.99 bottle being read as twenty times cheaper gas. At about 30p per stated litre the SWP’s 60 litres cost £17.99. At about 14p per stated litre the Gray Eagle’s 1,200 litres cost £169.99. The volume ratio is 20 and the money ratio is about 9.4, with a mini regulator in the dearer box and no UK reviews on that listing. At 15 litres a minute that is 80 minutes of continuous flow against four minutes. An adaptor or a second regulator can add a few pounds and still leaves four minutes against 80.

The labelled 60 litre Sealey bottles cost about £14 more than the SWP and do not leave the four-minute continuous sum. The MIGMIX2.2 prints 430 g and 2.2 litres together, and dividing £57.17 by 2.2 would invent a cost per welding litre. The four-pack at £192.57 is £48.14 a bottle, about £9 less per canister than £57.17. Four small bottles can finish a Saturday. They are not 1.2 cubic metres. BricoLoco at £78.29 states 1 litre of 86/14. The 60 cubic foot mark on the £306.07 shell is a rating on an empty parcel, the dearest way in the set to own no shielding gas until a filler quotes the gas.

Prices this piece will not stretch

This is not a market survey, a lab flow test, or a gas-company tariff. A BOC monthly rental is absent from the files and from the brochure used for the 11 hour example. Hobbyweld’s no-rental line does not transfer to BOC, Air Products, or a local depot. The forum range and the £57 headlines stay supplier pages until any deposit is added. Sealey’s trade site is a different column from these amazon.co.uk stickers. Grams stay grams, cubic feet stay a rating, and the SWP mix stays unstated. When the bead is longer than the reviews, separate the cartridge, the filled 8 litre bottle, and the empty shell on the argon gas cylinder comparison before you sort by price.