My Bucket Blaster arrived today, so I put it together and cleaned 3 kegs. The verdict: it cleans kegs like mine, which were not very dirty, well. You will still have to rinse kegs by hand, though, and you will still have to take your posts apart and clean them separately. Also, it's not designed so kegs balance all that well. You have to fiddle with it to get them stable. And it does not clean lids.
The product comes with a bunch of parts you have to put together. It's simple, but the directions are written badly. I keep thinking Kegland must be more of a Chinese company than an Australian one. The manual for the pump was labeled "MANTAL," and Kegland appears to have a store on Aliexpress.
You are told to cut a tube in three equal lengths. That's not very helpful, because then you have to measure a stiff, curved tube. I'll give you the answer: cut three 19-1/4" lengths. Much easier.
Basically, you put these tubes on the only T fitting that will accept them. Then you attach a Duotight fitting to the remaining T fitting, which is PVC. You run two of the tubes to disconnects, and you run the remaining one to the Duotight fitting on the PVC T.
The PVC T goes in the top of the pump. The long piece of PVC goes in the top of the PVC T. There is a little PVC cap with a hole in it, and it goes at the top of the long piece of PVC. You put a Duotight fitting on the end of each free tube, and you screw a disconnect into each of these fittings.
You're done.
There is no switch on the pump. You turn it on by plugging it in.
The instructions recommend Kegland's PBW alternative. Pretty surprising. I was going to use Five Star PBW, but then I remembered I had a big bin of homemade Oxi-Clean composed of washing soda and sodium something or other. You can look it up. Okay, I looked. It's sodium percarbonate. I decided I also wanted some TSP (real TSP, not the greenie stuff) in there, so I put about two teaspoons in a 2-ounce cup and filled it up with fake Oxi-Clean. I added this to two gallons of water.
Real Oxi-Clean also contains an expensive surfactant, but I have never found a powdered version, so I don't worry about it. After all, Dawn is a surfactant, and I have lots of that, and like I said, I have the real kind of TSP that kills unicorns and melts rainbows and makes Captain Planet make a frowny face.
The homemade cleaner definitely worked. I put my hand in the water for a few seconds to fix something, and it was pretty much defatted. It rinsed off everything very, very quickly and thoroughly.
Given how much sodium percarbonate costs today, along with the fact that Oxi-Clean is now available for $2.00 per pound, I would buy plain old Oxi-Clean if I were doing things over, and I would toss some TSP in it because I like TSP.
I cleaned one actual ball lock Corny and two off-brand converted pin locks. No problems at all. They are sparkly clean. I guess I ran each about 5 minutes. Three rinses from a shower handle (after removing the posts), and they were totally free of everything but water. I shot a pint or two of water in, turned the kegs upside-down to empty them, and repeated twice. That was all it took.
Does the Bucket Blaster save time? Not a lot. If you're washing three kegs, what are you going to do during the five or ten minutes the Blaster is working? It's not like you can go out for dinner. You still have to be there, but at least you're not scraping around inside a keg with a brush, getting PBW all over yourself. You can save some time if you do other tasks while the pump is running.
It also takes several minutes to clean the product. You have to dump it, rinse everything, fill it with fresh water, and run it briefly. Then you have to dump it and set it aside to dry. You can pack it in the handy bucket it operates in, but if you want it to dry out, you'll have to cut a lot of holes in the lid.
It's probably fantastic for carboys and other containers with small openings. Back when I had carboys, I hated cleaning them.
Overall, I think it's a good product. Just don't expect it to speed things up a great deal.
The product comes with a bunch of parts you have to put together. It's simple, but the directions are written badly. I keep thinking Kegland must be more of a Chinese company than an Australian one. The manual for the pump was labeled "MANTAL," and Kegland appears to have a store on Aliexpress.
You are told to cut a tube in three equal lengths. That's not very helpful, because then you have to measure a stiff, curved tube. I'll give you the answer: cut three 19-1/4" lengths. Much easier.
Basically, you put these tubes on the only T fitting that will accept them. Then you attach a Duotight fitting to the remaining T fitting, which is PVC. You run two of the tubes to disconnects, and you run the remaining one to the Duotight fitting on the PVC T.
The PVC T goes in the top of the pump. The long piece of PVC goes in the top of the PVC T. There is a little PVC cap with a hole in it, and it goes at the top of the long piece of PVC. You put a Duotight fitting on the end of each free tube, and you screw a disconnect into each of these fittings.
You're done.
There is no switch on the pump. You turn it on by plugging it in.
The instructions recommend Kegland's PBW alternative. Pretty surprising. I was going to use Five Star PBW, but then I remembered I had a big bin of homemade Oxi-Clean composed of washing soda and sodium something or other. You can look it up. Okay, I looked. It's sodium percarbonate. I decided I also wanted some TSP (real TSP, not the greenie stuff) in there, so I put about two teaspoons in a 2-ounce cup and filled it up with fake Oxi-Clean. I added this to two gallons of water.
Real Oxi-Clean also contains an expensive surfactant, but I have never found a powdered version, so I don't worry about it. After all, Dawn is a surfactant, and I have lots of that, and like I said, I have the real kind of TSP that kills unicorns and melts rainbows and makes Captain Planet make a frowny face.
The homemade cleaner definitely worked. I put my hand in the water for a few seconds to fix something, and it was pretty much defatted. It rinsed off everything very, very quickly and thoroughly.
Given how much sodium percarbonate costs today, along with the fact that Oxi-Clean is now available for $2.00 per pound, I would buy plain old Oxi-Clean if I were doing things over, and I would toss some TSP in it because I like TSP.
I cleaned one actual ball lock Corny and two off-brand converted pin locks. No problems at all. They are sparkly clean. I guess I ran each about 5 minutes. Three rinses from a shower handle (after removing the posts), and they were totally free of everything but water. I shot a pint or two of water in, turned the kegs upside-down to empty them, and repeated twice. That was all it took.
Does the Bucket Blaster save time? Not a lot. If you're washing three kegs, what are you going to do during the five or ten minutes the Blaster is working? It's not like you can go out for dinner. You still have to be there, but at least you're not scraping around inside a keg with a brush, getting PBW all over yourself. You can save some time if you do other tasks while the pump is running.
It also takes several minutes to clean the product. You have to dump it, rinse everything, fill it with fresh water, and run it briefly. Then you have to dump it and set it aside to dry. You can pack it in the handy bucket it operates in, but if you want it to dry out, you'll have to cut a lot of holes in the lid.
It's probably fantastic for carboys and other containers with small openings. Back when I had carboys, I hated cleaning them.
Overall, I think it's a good product. Just don't expect it to speed things up a great deal.
