I have seen AI vacuum oven set-ups wherein 3 ovens are being managed by a single pump.
Does anyone have any experience on 3-oven-1-pump setups using Cascade ovens (CVO-5s?) Does it work? Are there issues? Any experiential advice would be appreciated
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it works just fine for most, I’d recommend at the minimum to have valves to isolate each oven so when you release vac from one you aren’t releasing all of them.
Bonus points if you have a cold trap between each oven (at least one before the pump no matter what) for capturing terpenes and protecting your pump.
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I could be wrong here but I was under the impression that the slower you pull your vacuum the longer you keep a muffin up which is awesome for shatter. Depending on what your trying to produce it may be a good option it may not be.
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you could still control this by having valves at each oven to control the vacuum. if you really wanna fine tune the speed you could use a gate valve style valve.
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Cascade sells a kit for this. It’s really just a Tee fitting on the pump and two, hand valves on the oven. The important thing (like @thesk8nmidget said) is isolating the chambers so that you never equalize pressure through the pump.
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you can absolutely use a single pump on as many ovens as you want…however, at some point you will not be sucking hard enough to get the job done.
depending on the pump you chose, that might be while you’re sucking on ONE oven…or it might be four, or six…
I personally have seen single ovens without enough pump, and quads that were doing great. The last attempt I saw at running six ovens off the same pump was not at win.
so the more appropriate question might be “which pump(s) are up for the task?”.
a 10CFM dry scroll will handle one of those ovens nicely…but is underpowered for three imo. I’d prefer 20CFM on two ovens and 40CFM on four. pretty sure I’ve run two ovens successfully on 15CFM in the past.
if you’re willing to suck for days you can certainly get by with less pump.
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It works. Might have to change pump oil more often.
Yes, and maintaining vac on a tight system is pretty easy once upon get there. I would isolate each chamber during evacuation and then open all the valves once they are all under a Torr or two. Evacuating 4 ovens in series would be much more effective than trying to vac down 4 ovens at the same time.
Man, I miss the lab. I want to get in there and turn valves.
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