Transferring from primary to keg: pump instead of pressure?

[Ike]

SO, I'm really excited by some of the posts I've seen lately showing how some folks are using CO2 pressure to move your hooch from primary to secondary/keg. I know head pressure usually does the job on this one, but I like how people are doing this to keep their finished product oxygen-free.

ALSO, this is of particular interest to be because I do a lot of ciders, and am exploring filtering. It seems that a lot of people do a gravity transfer to a keg, then seal everything up and transfer to another keg through the filter setup, using CO2 to provide the "push."

SO, I'm excited about using CO2 AND head pressure to push beers/ciders from primary into secondary, but passing it through the filter system on this transfer, saving the second keg-to-keg transfer.

That's the setup. Here's the question:

Anyone ever use a small pump to move beer/cider/whatever from point A to B instead of compressed CO2?

I know a lot of folks use Chuggers and similar pumps in their brewing setups. I'm thinking about something smaller, maybe a peristaltic pump:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S0FVFC4/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

OR, just another pump similar to the pond pump I use to move ice water through my IC:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JWJIC0K/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

Dunno about the inner workings of the second one, and how difficult it'd be to sanitize. But, it IS submersible, so I figured worst case I'd just fire it up and dunk the whole thing in Starsan and let it circulate a while.


The reason I ask: yeah, I have a kegerator with CO2 and a regulator. But, it's all plumbed up to a secondary regulator, and the whole shebang is outdoors. SO, in the single digit temps, I either have to disconnect everything to bring the tank/reg indoors, or I have to do the whole operation outdoors.

Sure, I could buy another tank and reg. But, if I could just plug a pump in and go...

Waddaya think?

 

[day_trippr]

Sans the filter, pretty much any pump would do. But a peristaltic pump would likely offer superior performance when driving cider through a filter, as the centrifugal pumps we use on brew rigs provide rather anemic static pressure...

Cheers!

 

[wbarber69]

What if you only needed to prime a siphon? instead of having to pump all the wort from vessel to vessel, couldn't you use a peristaltic pump to prime the siphon and then let physics take over from there. ive been toying with the notion of something similar. mainly because when I secondary or lager my jugs go up into the top chamber of my fridge. it can get a bit awkward when trying to move a nearly full carboy around so I can get it into the right position to start a siphon, then there's the hassle of either suck-starting the siphon (not recommended) or using a bit of pre- sanitized water and dumping out into a pre-fill bucket then quickly pinching the hose to stop the flow while you toss it into the wide open keg…… or you can reverse pressure pull using a little bit of co2 in the keg, but if you do that wrong then you can blow back into your trube. I was thinking about maybe having a permanently installed, cleanable sealed system that you could easily transfer as soon as your ready without having to move any hoses into place and with minimal lid lifting on all vessels. thinking about a spring loaded type of peristaltic pump that could just be snapped on and off of a gravity fed system. once the siphon hose is primed then the rollers would disengage and allow the beer to flow naturally just like it would with a regular siphon.