dryline vacuum system

[halladaymaple]

Hi:

Can anyone send me information on a dryline vacuum system. From what I have read so far it amy help my pipeline areas that are relativily flat in nature with only minimal slope.

thanks
DArrell

Darrell.halladay@sympatico.ca

[Jim Brown]

halladaymaple: We use a dry line on one of our bushes that we have a 3/4 line with 700 taps on it.( not enough room for the sap and vac in the same line when things are running hard) What you do is take another line off your releaser,if you have another plug you can remove and don't have a line hooked to each of the four plugs, and run that line(say 1 inch or 3/4) up into your bush say 4-500 feet or depending on how far you want to go or have to go, and take a piece of 4 inch pvc say 24 -30 inches long reduce it down on both ends so it matches your line sizes. now fasthen it up to a tree putting the top at about 5-6 feet.Fasthen the DRY line you just ran to the top and fasthen the bottom to the main line. Your vacuum system will not pull the sap up through the 4 inch but will give you the same vac up in the bush that you have at your releaser.It woks great for us a matter of fact we intend to put one in our other bush next year. It just moves your vacuum up the bush passed the liquid in the sap line.
Hope this helps
Jim

[halladaymaple]

Hi:

Thanks for your reply. Its helps me visualize what this is going to look like. I have available prts on the SAP releaser so I think it will work. Thanks again for responding. Hope your season is going great

thanks
DArrell

[Whitfield]

From what I have read and my experience tends to confirm is that the dry line should be at least 1 size larger than the wet line. eg a 3/4" wet line should have a 1" dry line. I have two wet dry line systems. In the first I have two 1-1/2" dry lines and a 1-1/4" wet line that go out 1100 feet from the vaccum pump where all three lines connect to a 12" diameter booster tank similar to the 4" PVC" pipe described by Jim. I have on the order of 2000 taps tying in on four lines to this tank. I appear to loose about 1" Hg over the 1100 feet. There are no sap tie ins between the tank and the booster tank .

My other system consists of a 1-1/2" dry line and 1-1/4" wet line which drop down to 1-1/4" and 1" in the last few hundred feet. This sytem is on the order of 2500 feet long. I have 15 or 16 - 1" mixed flow lines tying into the system using 2" PVC manifolds modeled on those I saw at the Proctor center. This system seems to be less effective at transfering the vacuum over long distances. My thinking is that the consistent 1' spacing I maintain between the wet and dry lines does not provide sufficient differential to prevent some of the sap getting sucked up into the "dry" line at the tie in points which results in impaired performance. The sap then travels down the wet line in slugs moving so fast that they don't drop out at successive manifolds. I think installing a few knock out pots similar in design to that suggested by Jim may significantly improve my vacuum at the far end. I was at Lowes last night buying PVC fittings and I plan to give it a try this week.

One observation is that after a freeze up the "dry" line will generally thaw first and start flowing sap before the "wet" line thaws, so you do want to maintain your "wet" line slope to the vaccum tank just as if it were a wet line. In the case of the "PVC" pipe I would suggest that you can take your vacuum pump side "dry" line off the "PVC" pipe up as high as you want, but if you have a "dry" line on the bush side continuing on - it should come in low enough so that the "dry" line will drain through the "PVC" pipe into the "wet" line.

I do believe that wet dry systems boost yields at least in instances where you have taps located more than 600 - 1000 feet from your vacuum releaser tank. At the far end of my mainlines where previously I had essentially no vacuum I now have 12" Hg or more.

Whitfield