Hope it ok if I ask my pump question here. Finding good information on electric pumps has been a real pain and while looking up the Fatboy pumps I found several informative posts in these forums and thought maybe someone here knows something about electric pumps in general.
We use power sprayers for doing exterior house pesticide spraying and barn spraying. The sprayers currently use gas powered motors with roller pumps. The companies that build them are more focused towards lawn and turf spraying or agricultural spraying, and the sprayers are put together with no thought towards space efficiency and as such a 100 gallon spray rig will nearly fill the bed of a truck. Simple math tells me that if the tank is 48" wide (my truck bed width) 20" deep and 26" tall (to see out the rear window) it will hold over 100 gallons. So I found a tank and next I need to replace the waste of space motor and pump. I know a fair amount about electric motors and I figured certainly someone has build a 12v pump that is better than the shurflo 60 psi pumps, I see sold on every power sprayer web site.
And sure enough with a bit of looking I first ran into Pumptec pumps. Their largest motor is a 60 amp motor as compared to shureflo’s 17 amps. And they span a huge range of psi and gpm. But as I inquired more about them even the companies that sold their pumps had no idea how to configure the plumbing. I then found the Hypro Versa-Twin pumps. While similar to the Pumptec pumps they have very clear plumbing diagrams on their web site and were at a similar psi and gpm, but their pumps run at 35 and 39 amps, and are a bit cheaper. Also, they are not self priming which isn’t a deal breaker as I know how I could deal with that. Then, while researching, I found a third option of using pumps in parallel. But as the physics of it eludes me I am not certain if this would work. I understand how to hooking up batteries in parallel (or series) to get different output, but that is electricity. It would seem to me that if I had 2 Fatboy 7870 pumps (I assume only the bypass model could do this) and if one pressurized the line to 150 psi the other would not be able to add any more psi to it.
Before I get to the questions I should note we need a fair amount of distance from a pump. Some houses, do to landscaping, design, terrain, or simply their size, I am figuring we will need at least 40 feet of vertical distance to hit gable end peeks, but do to regulations we can’t just pump tons of pesticide up there till we hit it, so the range needs to exceed that so I can hit it in one quick pass. I experimented with a 60 psi pump we had laying around and it could easily do 30+ feet vertically. So maybe a single 150 psi Fatboy 7870 could do the job. I did see a video on youtube of a guy, with a pressure washing rig (I guess), that got over 40 feet (horizontally) with it wide open. He showed the nozzle tip and it was clearly much wider than what we have. The opening on the tips on our spray guns are about 3/32 of an inch (2.5 mm), and we can get some that are quite a bit smaller.
So, maybe the first question should be could just one Fatboy 7870 give me the 50’ish feet of vertical distance I need, with the smaller opening we have in our tips?
If not would 2 Fatboy 7870’s hooked up in parallel actually give me more psi, and then thereby more distance, and if so how much more?
And lastly maybe the Hypro Versa-Twin pump, is the only option I have, and I am just wondering if anyone would know if they could do the job I need them to?
Last little bit of info, the hose we use is 1/2 in. ID and we have between 200 and 300 feet on the sprayers which I am guessing would effect the efficiency of any pump setup.
Thanks in advance.
