Safefill - Refillable Gas Cylinders

I have a Safefill 7.5KG in my Coachman with a Calor 6KG as spare / backup. I also have a Gaslow 2.7Kg in my VW T6 Conversion.

Refillables are brilliant, a lot cheaper to use, as long as you do your homework on filling points

We live in Cheltenham on the M5, if we go West, East or South we can fill at Morrison's Bristol or AndyGas close to Morrison's. If we go North there are plenty of opportunity to refill

A point to note though i always top up my bottles on the way home from a trip NOT going out if i can.

In my experience DONT DISPLAY your portable bottles to the attendant or CCTV and crack on with filling, if they dont notice its portables thats fine OR if they do its too late to object anyway!

Had intended using Andy Gas, but they required us to leave the bottle one day near closing time and collect the following day near closing time.

As we were passing through that didn't work for us.

I'm delighted with my 2 x 7.5 kg Safefill cylinders, which we purchased mainly for touring in Europe where LPG refilling points are plentiful. You may find this map useful. https://www.caravanclub.co.uk/club-together/discussions/welcome-hobby-talk/tips-for-making-caravanning-touring-cheaper/map-sheet-of-lpg-uk-stations-for-refilables

 

 

It appears that after Brexit/Covid in 2020 Safefill had problems importing the cylinders from Europe. and I believe that talking to other companies on the business park there is no activity and gates closed

One can, if in Europe especially Germany  purchase a 'Safefill'  bottle called CAMPKO Composite refillable gas bottle. If you look on the 'myLPG.EU' website these are cleared to refill Gaslow refill bottles, there is no reason that a Safefill user cannot also use these sites

Hopefully if we get to Europe next year we will purchase a refillable 10kg cylinder but for the moment we use a Antargaz 'Calypso' butane 10kg from France.

I'm not sure the main issues were or are Brexit / Covid. This is what I heard, may or may not be correct.

The Safefill bottles were supplied by Hexagon / Ragasco (pretty sure that is 100% true), a firm from Norway. This is the largest manufacturer of Gas bottles in the world and they are predominantly Fibreglass. Safefill worked with them to get an offering with additional safety features built-in to allow end user filling. These were the Safefill bottles.

Rumour has it, when Calor ended their Calor Lites, they were looking for a new supplier and as part of process, Calor were in negotiations with Hexagon Ragasco but said they needed to be sole supplier in the UK. No surprise there. Calor like to exploit monopolies and Safefill lost their bottle supplier.

Since then they found another bottle supplier and built a new product (I think a Czech company) and so the bottles weren't available for a while. Now they seem to arrive in batches but sell out very quickly - demand is very high!!!

I don't believe they stock or sell directly anymore, and use a bunch of retailers to do that so that might explain why their business unit is quiet.

I've now got 3 x 10kg bottles and they are brilliant and the support I've had from the owner is still as swift and professional as ever.

Plus you save a ton of money and always have a full bottle!

A friend who was in touch will Safefill today said they are having more stock hopefully arriving in Oct /Nov 

A little more on the Calor conspiracy theories.....

I don't have any refillables, I have used the BP Light, Gaslight system for several years. When we first swapped to BP, I found a small supplier on an industrial estate who specialised in the sale of gas. He offered Calor and the BP, the BP was the cheapest by a large margin compared to other suppliers and very much cheaper than Calor for similar sizes.

A couple of years after I bought into BP, I went to him for another refill only to have him announce that he had been told by Calor that unless he stopped selling the BP, they would cut off his supply of Calor.

I also heard similar tales of being bullied, from other gas suppliers.

 

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