Installed my little pump on Saturday night... It was a bad time of night to do much testing because the temperature was dropping fast and the sap was shutting down... but my initial stopwatch test showed about 100% improvement over the lines just hanging it the barrel.
I should have taken a picture, but I built a little manifold with PVC T's, etc... incl a vacuum gauge, bypass and 4 barbs for the incoming 3/16 lines, with 9-15 taps each. I also added a small ATV battery, permanently, to keep the temperature controller powered up while changing out batteries.
The pump would go to about 25" of mercury when it was moving liquid... and would drop down to about 18" intermittently when air bubbles from the trees accumulated. I do have a bypass line and needle valve... but it didn't seem to be helping much, so I just turned it off...
Went back out yesterday and got it going again..... The temperature controller started it up a little early... but I was there to turn it off for a while. Started it up mid morning on 25 taps... Over the course of the next couple hours, I added an additional 25 taps... by last night, I think I had approximately 70 or 80 gallons. Large Car battery was still pumping after about 9 hours of running.
Quite happy with the first day..
BTW - My buckets in my own bush (more shade) netted very little yesterday.