The 10 Best CO2 Regulators
Special Honors
Titan Controls This company offers a number of US-manufactured monitors and controllers that can be used in tandem with your C02 regulator, allowing you to take your indoor-garden automation to the next level. titancontrols.net
Editor's Notes
April 30, 2020:
While most of our selections managed to maintain their positions through this round of updates, we did remove the Mod Complete Flow due to availability issues. In its place, we added the Titan Controls Kit 702718, which comes with a cyclical timer and 25 feet of rain hose, so it should provide you with virtually everything you need to introduce a CO2 system to a small grow room.
A few things to think about for this category:
Gauges: You might notice that most of our selections for this category have two gauges, while others have only one. This doesn’t necessarily doom the single-gauge options to inferior status, but rather is a reflection of the intended purpose for each regulator. The first gauge is always responsible for keeping track of input pressure from your tank, and the second gauge lets you know what the regulator's output pressure is, which is important for things like grow rooms and aquariums that aim to achieve an ideal C02 level in a controlled environment. However, for models like the Interstate Pneumatics WRCO2, which are designed for paintball, monitoring your output pressure is unnecessary, so a second gauge would just be gratuitous. The AGPtek HF43U may also appear to be a single-gauge offering to the untrained eye, but it does, in fact, have a second gauge in the form of a bubble counter, which brings me to my next point.
Bubble Counters: These devices allow users to achieve a visual sense of how much C02 they’re emitting, by counting the bubbles that pass through the counter. In many cases, they’re included as a supplementary gauge, although in the case of the AGPtek HF43U it replaces the output gauge altogether. It might seem superfluous, and like a bit of a primitive technology next to an engineered gauge, but many hobbyists like these devices for ongoing “drip” emissions, as in the case of an aquarium, because there’s no real way for them to malfunction and lie to you. In lieu of pounds per square inch or parts per million, users referring to bubble counters will often simply use bubbles per second as a metric.
Control: A regulator’s a good place to start, but if you’re looking to fine tune an indoor garden to optimize growth influencing factors, you’ll likely want to consider investing in a controller to work in tandem with your regulator. Arguably, the simplest form of controller would be a cyclical timer, like the one that comes with the Titan Controls Kit 702718, but there’s a wide variety of advanced controllers available on the market that monitor CO2 levels and automatically adjust them if they fall outside your programmed range.
October 19, 2018:
Eliminated the Titan Controls 702710 from the list after discovering reports of poor internal components, and also removed the CO2Meter RAD-0501 due to availability concerns. Added six new products that combine to address a variety of applications — keg operation, hydroponics, aquariums, paintball and powering pneumatic tools.