Wow!!! This thing can MOVE water!!!! It will easily POP a shop-vac hose on the outlet side. I kinda wish there was a speed slower than idle so my hoses would stay together, lol. A 20ft shop-vac hose will stretch another 3ft under the pressure and little jets of water will shoot up. I guess I'm going to have to break down and buy an outlet hose. :D3.5 gallons of water every second boggles the imagination until you see what kind of forces we're talking about!
The shop-vac hose works fine for the intake side though. A little electrical tape seals the deal. No priming or anything like that.... Just fill the pump with water from a gallon milk jug, plop the intake hose in the water, fire it up and hang on!
The engine runs nice and is relatively quiet. The labels were backwards for the choke and throttle which made it a little confusing when I first fired it up, but no big deal. I'm just tickled pink I can move THAT much water for $200!!! I tried one of those $80-$90 electrical pumps first. I suppose they would be ok to empty a fish tank, but for a pool or pond.... Forget about it. Twice the price I'm moving 100 times the water!
I was a little worried since I've never heard of PowerMax before, but it seems to be every bit as good as a Briggs so far.... They look a lot alike too.
Shipping was super fast. Got it 2 days earlier than I thought.
These are considered dewatering pumps. I have a 20' suction with about a 3'lift. The discharge varies anywhere from 150' to 200' head. I run the engine at half throttle and it lasts about 2 hours running time. The advertisement says it'll run 2.5 hours on a tank of fuel. So not bad.
I took it out of the box, added engine oil, filled the gas tank, hooked up the discharge and suction hoses, opened the fuel valve, choked the carb, two pulls, and whammo, has been running all day.
I don't however understand the output though as it says 220 gpm's. It that at idle or full throttle? No matter, for it's size, cost and easy mainetenance it's well worth the cost.
The only probem I had with delivery was it was supposed to be delivered on 1-15-13 and it didn't make it until 1-18 due to a shipping label mixup.
If I had to buy another pump, this would be my choice.If you need to pump a lot of water, this unit works fine. I did not know anything about pumps, but soon learned. Took down to my pond during the drought to learn how it works & it can pump a lot of water...
My final use is to use with my well to pump water to the garden during the hot part of the year...Saved me thousands of dollars. Storm Sandy flooded my Dad's basement on Long Island. The disaster recovery companies, "thieves", were charging $2500 $3400 for pump out. With no experience I ordered this pump and appropriate hoses. It was unbelievable! In 45 minutes it pumped out 30" of water in a full basement. A big caution: You can not run the generator dry. Also, priming the pump proved easy, but the procedure was not described in the manual for applications requiring big suction side lifting. The manual indicated that the only necessary priming is to pour a limited amount of water into the pump body through a plug on top of the pump. This is probably not adequate if you need to suck up a significant lift such as 6 feet down a basement. I was advised by someone with a lot of experiences to fill up the entire discharge hose if possible, and possibly part of the suction side, in addition to the pump body as indicated in the manual. Once you get a big column of water moving on the discharge side, the resultant vacuum will pull the water up into the pump on the suction side. Use the water in the discharge side hose to keep the pump full and wet while you wait for the pump "to catch". It took close to a minute, but man did it pump. Worked first try. For this reason you probably need a long discharge hose to prime the pump effectively for a long suction lift. I imagine many people think that they can skip buying a discharge hose. This would be a mistake. If you only need to lift a couple feet then no discharge hose is probably necessary. I bought a hose kit with 20 ft suction and 25 ft discharge. I followed the advice above and it worked great! I will say that the required massive and stiff 3" suction hose is awkward to handle, and it was a bit of overkill. The pump became useless at about 3" of remaining depth. It just sucked a hole in the water and sucked mostly air. A pool cover pump loaned to me was able to suck the floor nearly dry, less than 1/4". The sump pumps seemed to require at least 1.5 inches of water to operate. I am no expert, but I had great results with this gas pump and I think above advice is accurate.This pump gets a 5 star rating because it costs $220, it is not contractor quality. I have used it 4 times over the past 2 years. Warning = the hoses & fittings for the pump cost more than the pump itself. If your a homeowner who needs a high volume pump once in a while, you wont find a better deal.
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