Vacuum Powered Piston Pump

[spud]

I'm looking in the new Lapierre catalog on page 53 at these piston pumps. I will be needing a pump for 1700 taps in a few years and thought this might work. I will be pumping 550 feet at an elevation of about 80 feet. I'm thinking the duel action pump would be best for me. This pumps 340 gallons an hour at 132 feet elevation. there must be several Traders that have these pumps. I'm wondering if you could tell me the pro's and con's to these? Some thoughts i'm having are does it run on a float set-up? Does it have a check valve or does it allow sap to run back into the tank when it shuts off? I would not want 550 feet of pipe to be full of sap and then freeze. Would a 3hp air-tec pump ( or similar )be able to run this and a mechanical releaser? Any advise or thoughts would be great. Thanks in advance.

Spud

[Thompson's Tree Farm]

They work but eat cfm's

[spud]

How much CFMs do they use up?

Spud

[bigtreemaple]

We have used a single action one for several years with good success. It does run on a float system. We have ours in a small building with the mechanical extractor dumping into one end of a tank and the vac pump pumping out of the other end. We have fewer taps than you are talking about but there is no problem for the pump to keep up and a good part of the time it is not running, but waiting for the sap level to trip the float. We use 1" line and yes it does have a check valve and a drain valve so you can drain back into the tank to avoid freeze up. Our setup pumps over a hill then it is gravity down the other side to the big storage tank, sometimes a siphon get going which is nice.

We do loose a few inches of vacuum when the transfer pump is running but I don't see that as too big of a deal. All in all it is a simple machine that works well but we keep it inside and either drain it or keep it warm.