Posted: 5/5/2013 12:10:45 PM EDT
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I have a couple steel drums and a fuel transfer pump from TSC. The pump is a GPI EZ-8. My plan was to use one drum for gas, the other for kerosene, but moving the pump from one drum to the other is a PITA!
The pump threads into the 2" bung, but the whole unit, hose and all, has to be screwed in. I'd rather not spend another $300 total to outfit the second drum with it's own pump, but I'm not sure how else to make it less of a PITA. Anyone else using one pump with multiple drums? What was your fix for this problem? |
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One pump for multiple fuel drums seemed like a PITA to me. Not only do you have the nuisense of moving the pump back and forth, you will also have to flush the hose of previous product since you are using gasoline and kero. My situation was similar. I had a 55 gal. drum of Real gasoline, not ethanol, with a rotary hand pump with filter and hose. I actually needed more storage, so I got a 100 gal. tank at the local farm store and moved the rotary hand pump from the drum to the new tank and found a used hand pump and filter with hose and mounted it into the 55 gal. drum for off road diesel fuel. A little pricey since I bought a new 100 gal tank but used ones just didn't seem available at the time.
Whatever way you decide, you should always add a fuel filter to your pump. Just cheap insurance from bigger problems. |
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Contaminating one fuel with the other has been kind of a niggling thought about my setup. I don't think I want any gasoline going into the glow heater. Maybe I should just get a hand pump for the K-1 so I don't have to worry about it. Perhaps I'll tackle that one later this year, when winter is coming again.
In the meantime, I think I'll work on putting them on my somewhat useless HF 40"x48" trailer. An upright drum with pump on it is kind of tall for the trailer, and that would just compound the problem of building a cover over it. I thought today about lying the drums down, but then I'd need to mount/support the pump some way and plumb it to the now-sideways drum. That would lower the height of the setup by a fair bit. |
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If you are going to put the drum sideways let gravity do it for you. You can just set up a valve to turn on the flow on the bung you put on the bottom and when filling you open up the top bung to fill it. If your trailer can tilt it makes it possable to get more into or more out of the drum depending on how you set things up. I have a drum dolley and it is made to roll a drum onto its side. The dolley then becomes a stand. So the dolley is not something to be used with multiple drums, but it lets me roll a drum onto the dolley and the drum winds up a foot and half to two feet in the air. This is plenty high enough to put a kerosene can under a valve setup on the drum. Now the dolley does not let me easily haul it to fill it at a gas station. Depending on your size and willingness to mess with manhandling a drum you can siphon a drum down so far. Depends on your determination and jug size and what not. Then you can just tip the drum on its side and get it onto some sort of stand and if you want to just pick the whole thing up you can do that as well. As I get older I don't manhandle stuff nearly as much unless I have to do so. The drum dolley is rusty and needs rebuilt to roll again but it can easily roll a drum onto its side and it will hold the full drum up just fine, keep in mind how heavy a full drum would be. To some extent being able to stand the drums upright with no handpump on them would be the way to fill them at a gas station. Then maybe a drum dolley or a homebuilt setup to roll them onto their sides when you get home. Do some reading and playing in a grainger catalog and some other industrial catalogs to see what is out there. I have a couple pumps. They have their uses. But once you get into storing food in drums and fuel in drums you might start thinking about good ways to move drums around. |