Racking equipment

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Sailor323

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For years I used a bit of plastic pipe with vinyl hose to rack from 15 gallon kegs and 5 gallon carboys. I got the siphon going by sucking the wine into the hose. This worked well, there's no telling how many hundreds of gallons I siphoned and bottled with this system. Then I got a racking/siphon thing that gets the siphon going by pushing the racking wand down into the cylinder. This worked rather well, but not as well as the low tech approach. I like that the apparatus had a filter/baffle on the end which limited the amount of sediment picked up but it was a bit awkward to use and it was difficult to get a good siphon going.. So then I looked at a hybrid system--a simple racking cane with a baffle on the end and a piece of vinyl hose. I could suck on the end of the hose in an attempt to get a siphon going. I got very mixed results, the siphon was very difficult to get started and then would lose the siphon easily. I think the baffle/filter interferes with the siphon. It's also possible that the vinyl hose was too long and had a bit of loop in it. I've looked at various fluid transfer systems and kind of like the Terapump system. Does anyone have experience with this or something similar? I'm a low tech kind of guy and not looking for anything fancy, just something that resists picking up sediment and is easy to get going.
 
I am not bothering with a transfer pump, until I get an AIO system. I don't make enough in a batch,not more than 7-8 gallons. The autosiphons you describe that are common are the easiest to use, pick up very little sediment except at first moving from active fermentation. Otherwise, this Italian blow-siphon is easy, put a sanitary filter on the blow-port and you are good to go. No sucking on the end of a hose, lowtech and simple.
If you have a lot of sediment to negotiate around, you're not quite ready for bottling yet.
 

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