Have you ever been frustrated like me with mini regulators that allow a portable, quick carbonation of a fermenting or finished beer in a keg? Great idea, convenient, nice addition to any brewery. Unfortunately, it seems like you always lose gas when installing the cylinder and it ends up leaking so you lose all the gas and pressure. Very annoying....
I recently purchased the Kegland mini-regulator. While I was not expecting much based on past experiences, I was pleasantly surprised with this unit. Turns out it delivers as promised (at least so far).
I purchased the unit from Amazon - not cheap ($90) but a solid, heavy duty piece of equipment. As the video below describes, it solves some of the issues with previous versions of the unit. For me the most important piece is that it doesn't leak gas. Sure enough, worked like a charm!
The key feature here is the actuator. This is a hand turned screw that allows you to pull the pin out of the unit while screwing in the cylinder, then turn the actuator clockwise to puncture the cylinder after it's already been seated. Brilliant!
Since it's also compatible with a soda stream cannister (or 16g threaded cylinders), it could actually become your main gas source for a 5g keg.
Here are some advantages to using one of these units:
No need to move your main CO2 tank to add some pressure to a fermenter
Allows convenient, quick burst of pressure to take a gravity reading and sample
Allows pressurizing your beer as it cold crashes in the fermentation fridge
Allows portability - take your keg anywhere and pressurize
Allows use of a soda stream cannister, which holds a good amount of gas
Overall I would say this is a 10/10 but we will see if I have any performance issues over time.
Update: 5/22/23: It turns out that the soda stream cannister threads are different in other countries than the US. The manufacturer suggests buying the regulator from a vendor in your home country so the threads will be the proper ones. I used Amazon and the Soda Stream CO2 cannister didn't fit. Apparently I got the Australian version since Kegland is from there. So I returned the unit and bought one from MoreBeer.com
Here's a detailed video on the features of the unit:
Looks like a great product - might give it a try!