Back in October 2011, while delivering our Rural Water Supply Operations Seminar in Morrivale, West Virginia, we had the opportunity to work with several vacuum tankers. The folks at the Morrisvale VFD are very good at maximizing the use of their vacuum tankers and we wanted to try a couple of things. We wanted to see how far we could "push" water through 5-inch LDH using just the pressure built up by the tanker's vacuum pump in the off-loading mode.

Morrisvale's 2,000 gallon vacuum tanker was set-up to off-load its water into a 2,500 gallon dump tanker that was located about 100 feet away. To get to the dump tank, water had to be pushed through 100-feet of 5-inch LDH. We had no way to measure flow other than to measure the total time taken to empty the vacuum tanker. The good thing is that a vacuum tanker will off-load just about every gallon of water.

The results...the 2,000-gallon vacuum tanker was emptied in 2 minutes and 10 seconds for a flow rate of 922 gpm. Quite impressive! We will leave it up to our readers to determine applications for this set-up.

A complete summary of this test can be found in our Data section of the Big Water Information menu item.