DC Water Pump Review

I saw these for sale at greatbreweh.com, researched and found they are a small pump designed for use in solar hot water heaters.  Pump body and impeller are Ryton, with brass inlet/outlet.  They are made to run off a solar PV so they work on a range of DC voltages.  I bought a Pumpsflo 15 that is supposed to pump 3gal/min.  I am wanting to use it for whirlpooling with an IC, so I plumbed it up for this and gave it a run tonight.  Heated water in my kettle while running this little pump, went to 97F and measured flow.  It was 2gal/min, enough for a nice whirlpool from what i could tell.  Primed itself nicely although I didn’t start it when the water was already hot.

I bought this for $61 from ebay (free shipping), the ones from the site mentioned above are about $84 with shipping ($70 apiece if you buy two) and they come with an AC converter and the brass is mostly coated with Ryton.  If I build a brew stand I’ll probably buy a March but these things are a nice alternative.  Its less than half the price and has less than half the flow, seems fair.

Yesterday I used the pump to whirlpool a 15gal batch in a keggle.  Worked nicely, seemed to have the right flow for the job.  Got the wort temp down with the homemade IC in about 20min.  Then I used it to transfer wort to carboys, that was an easy job for it but it did more than double the flow rate over just using gravity feed.

Looks like a great deal.

It works for certain applications anyway.  Not sure it would push wort through a 50’ CFC.  Since I decided to go whirlpool/IC instead of CFC, I figured I’d give it a shot.

Pre-ordered myself the SS one, won’t ship for a week and a half so I’m being patient(lies)

Looks nice. Putting on my list for next year’s tax refund.  ;D

Do you have an Ebay link?