Shurflo 4048 Vacuum Pump Set-up

This year we decided to help coerce mother nature a tad and force our Red Maples to run a little more consistently.  Having red maples our sap flow tends to be finicky and not every tree runs as consistently as it should.  So after doing some reading up last year we discovered that the Pro’s deal with this by putting all their trees under vacuum.  These vacuum systems are big bucks ($1,200+) and out of reach for the hobby sugar makers like ourselves.  That was of course until I came across this tread on the MapleTrader forum regarding a 1st Day – Sap Puller.

Basically, small scale Sugarers were experimenting with using a small RV water pump to provide some small scale vacuum and had great success.  Now the cost for this can very depending on how much stuff you have laying around, but is not unreasonable. if it can provide some additional sap which would translate into additional syrup.

Other than some miscellaneous wiring materials, an extension cord, and some scrap wood, I had none of the materials on hand, so I kept track of the parts and pieces and itemized them in the spreadsheet below.  There is a lot of good information on the Maple Trader forum link above, but no parts list, and you have to do a fair amount of reading and guesswork to arrive at the kit of parts that you would need.  My list should give you everything you need to hook the pump up to a 1/2” plastic mainline.  To keep the battery charged I wan an extension cord to the 2 Amp harbor freight battery charger.  For now I operate the pump manually with the on/off switch.  The goal at some point is to tie in a temperature sensor, but for this year we will be on manual operation.

There is no real magic to the setting up and wiring the pump.  I attached the pump to a piece of pine and set it in the bottom of the plastic bin.  I dry fit all the pieces together to find out how much space the battery and charger would need and to finalize the layout of the inlet and outlet of the pump.  I then eyeballed where to drill a couple holes for the 1/2” main line in the outside of the plastic bin.  I pulled the battery and charger out of the bin drilled the holes and wired up the pump, and switch using 14ga. wire with electrical connectors that could be removed if I needed to swap the pump out down the road.

Below is the simple toggle switch wired up and ready to go.

Below all wiring is complete and I have attached the ice strainer, two 1/2” threaded valves, and the 1/2” to 3/4” swivel connectors.  The thought with the swivel connectors is that I can slide the 1/2” mainline into the plastic bin with a couple 1/2” barb to 3/4” threaded male connectors so I can easily disassemble and bring the whole pump assembly into the house in the off season.

Below is the completed pump assembly ready to head into the woods.

Below is the pump set-up in the woods with the bin cover in place.  We have had rain and snow and the insides of the bin have been dry so the cover seems to be working.

We actually ended up cutting in a couple tees and attaching it to our collection tank so that we can valve off the incoming sap and pump the sap to a tank in our collection vehicle….This was a chilly exercise that we did in the field one evening after work as our 35 gallon tank was in threat of overflowing.

A quick shot of our 35 gallon sap collection tank at the end of the mainline.  We will link up to some of the videos we shot of the pump in action in a later post.