My Purolator driver likes to deliver these McMaster-Carr boxes because he gets to look at the latest changes to my machine room (and to visit the caramel fridge in my office.)...
This is the setup I used to calibrate the vacuum sensor. The vacuum line connects on the right. The right T is the vacuum sensor. The left T is a vacuum gauge. The ball valve allows me to easily release the vacuum....
I built this releaser from PVC pipe that I bought at Lowe's in Ogdensburg, NY, check valves and solenoids that I bought on Ebay, and fence T-bars that I bought at TSC. The controller was an Arduino Nano in the grey box on the side of the releaser. This one was vertical and sat on top of the IBC draining into the port on the top....
Like most of the things I build this was put together from parts I bought on Ebay, at Lowe’s and my local Home Hardware. It used 100 GPD membranes and a small booster pump. It chugged away but we quickly outgrew it.
In 2020 I a hand and I built this insulated box so hold the vacuum pump, RO pumps, vacuum releaser, and RO. This prevented them from freezing overnight and eliminated the necessity to carry them in every night and back out every morning. The vacuum releaser is the two white circles on the right. The little heater bottom right...
This is the machine that runs my maple syrup machine room. The PLC (the large grey box on the left in the second section from the top) runs a MEGA2560 Pro Mini with an ESP32 as a WiFi modem. There are more than 4,000 lines of BascomAVR running on the MEGA2560 and around 800 lines of Sketch on the ESP32....