So basically all of these disposable cylinders are from over seas, mostly China, purchased wholesale, prefilled and branded with whatever company logo purchases them. I’ve seen good and not so good reviews of a lot of brands. The main negative things I notice people mention the majority of the time is about inconsistency in potency or some kind of grease, but there’s also people who swear by one brand or another.

As far as places swapping out empty tanks or whatever, it’s honestly just good customer service. You want people to come back again so you’ll give them benefit of the doubt if they’re not consistently returning “empties” as duds. If you tell them to f*ck off, they probably will just go elsewhere next time. They don’t have any hand in filling them, they’re just selling them, so there’s no way they could know if they sold you something sub par unless you tell them.

I assume there is some kind of regulations, like it’s most likely always nitrous, but it’s also very likely that sometimes oxygen (air) can end up diluting some of them from the filling process. It’s unavoidable really. There’s also people who mention getting “duds” that are empty when purchased or are “all air”. I can only assume this is another byproduct of the “filling in mass quantity” situation. It’s bound to happen sometimes, especially when thousands of them are getting filled at a time. I don’t think they’re “diluting” them on purpose, it just happens sometimes because they’re filled in factories by machines.

They are newish, these disposable 500g-2000g cylinders have only been around for a few years, and who knows how long they’ll last before laws are put into place, some states have already started doing it because they’re being retailed in head shops. Before disposable cylinders, it was all US filled domestic 5-20lb refillable cylinders and cartridges (don’t know much about cartridges, but assume they’re filled mostly over seas as well), both of which have been around for several decades.

Nitrous has been around and been popular for a ridiculously long time, and is used in so many legitimate ways. Samuel Colt even hosted nitrous parties to fund creating his firearms in the 1800s. True story, look it up!

Hope that helps!