Lunchbox Vacuum Releaser

[Clan Delaney]

Dean- Got another one for ya. Let's say I wanted to run this, not off a compressor, but off a one-time pressurized tank (pressurize tank to 150psi in the shop, then take it out to the bush). Have you done any tests like this to determine how long the releaser would run?

[markct]

My guess Patrick would be that it wouldn't run for long, I use air pumps a good bit at work for pumping oil, larger of course, but they are very air hungry for the volume they move. Keeps a 5 hp compressor cycling pretty often just to run a 3/4 inch air diaphragm pump. Im sure these use less but still doubt it would run long unless you had a huge tank!

[Acer]

This comes up often and I haven't done testing...
a typical performance number for an aodd pump when used as vacuum/releaser would be 4 volumes of air at "standard conditions" for 1 volume of liquid pumped.
this means a 5 gallon tank at 150 psi would contain 50 gallons of air at standard conditions and pump 12 gallons of sap. Probably not practical. Certainly not enjoyable.

Propane starts to get interesting if you are up to the challenges of dealing with compressed flammable gasses.
5 gallons of propane makes 1300 gallons of propane at ambient. Which could pump 300 ish gallons of liquid.

In the end a really long air line is likely to be the best choice.

[markct]

what cfm these take? And how many gph they pump? Im curious about using one as a releaser on a reg vac system since an air line would be cheaper than electric to run far

[Acer]

what cfm these take? And how many gph they pump? Im curious about using one as a releaser on a reg vac system since an air line would be cheaper than electric to run far

Hi MarkCt,
Thanks for the question, the Lunchbox has to find its own flow/vacuum level operating point.
It will not work as a stand alone releaser on a vacuum system. It will either run all the time or not at all.


Dean

[Acer]

what cfm these take? And how many gph they pump? Im curious about using one as a releaser on a reg vac system since an air line would be cheaper than electric to run far

Open flow for that pump at 80 psi air is 168 gph. You will never get that amount pulling against vacuum.
Our test set will do over 60gph at 15-20 inches.
for reference we rate it at 100 taps which under vacuum should produce about .25 gpm of sap or 15 gph.

Some day I will post required cfm/tap but unfortunately can't get to it right now.

[softmaple]

set up the lunchbox today. it worked better than gravity would have. found many micro leaks in my old tubing setup so fixed those. with 10 leaks and a loose tap the 2 gallon air compressor ran every 5 and a half minutes on 29 taps. it worked better than I expected. happy to have made the investment.

[softmaple]

well after working a week on 29 taps and my father shutting it down a half day due to running every two minutes (he thought there was an air leak) but because the sap was running so good it needed to keep up with the flow, 200 gallons is not bad. whats a good week going to bring? a good week on gravity would yield 100 gallons or so.

[Bricklayer]

was wondering what people used as an air line? it looks like in the video its just 5/16 sap tubing. For this system to work for me I would have to run about 500 feet of air line to the unit then have it pump up about 20 feet and back about 400 feet downhill to the shack with the sap. will this system do that? I would assume I would need to put a check valve at the end of the line where it comes into the shack to stop syphoning?

[Acer]

Hi Brandon,
Just saw this, how many taps do you want to run on the lunchbox? I run 45 on a system very much like you describe with 5/16 tubing all around, If you were trying to run 100 taps on a 400' 5/16 pump line I would do a head loss calculation to make sure that was not a limiting factor( I can assist with that). You don't need a check valve anywhere. Hopefully your other questions were answered in the pm.