Surflow distance

I don't have many taps (about 15ish) but I would LOVE to use vacuum and try and get as much as I can from my few trees on my property. I now it might not be the most efficient given the few trees, but I think it could actually be pretty fun to see at my house, and it would make collecting "easier" pumping it all into 1 collection tank that I can stick into the woods away from most sun, and then have it gravity feed into my pan :-)

So I have a couple questions

#1 how far can the pump handle? The furthest trees are about 300-400 feet apart.
#2 can it handle any vertical? 4 of the taps are about 20-30 feet lower than the rest of the taps.

My thought was to have 2 runs and have the pump roughly in the middle so that it's at most 200 feet to the furthest trees. This was roughly where I wanted to put the tank anyway so if that is possible I think that's how I wanted to do it.

It will pull it if you are using 3/16 tubing. You get some frictional losses with longer lines so if you can shorten them that would be best. I have a couple runs that are 500' which I cannot shorten.

If you have to lift sap, you lose vacuum on that branch.

Dave

I would not plan on any ladder type rise from anything less than full vacuum because they don't have much CFM, which is needed for success with ladders. I used a Guzzler pump for our first introduction to vacuum. It was a great improvement over gravity. I think our total mainline (mostly 3/4" and some 1") was about 2000' total. We had about 400 taps on our single Guzzler.

Mike

I have been running several shurflo 4008's for the last 5 years. One section has a total of five, 3/16 laterals, 7-17 taps on each, total of 60 taps. One of these laterals has 17 taps and the shurflo pulls that sap uphill about 4'over the 250 length. Some of the other laterals have 10-20' drop after the last tap. A couple are pretty level. 4 laterals come in from the east and the low lateral comes in from the west. I have a vacuum gauge on the manifold, which is made from 1/2" pvc fittings, I'm pulling 25"/Hg on the whole system, on a good day I get 150 gallon off of 60 trees. The longest lateral is a little over 800' long. I have a valve on each lateral at the manifold so I can isolate and repair leaks. This section of woods have both reds and sugars, and I have the reds on their own laterals so I can turn them off at the manifold when they bud out.