Just a word of warning. If you deal with air compressors on or around the homestead or really anywhere else, just because you shut the air off or shut the regulator down it doesn’t mean there is no pressure left in the line.
A lesson I was reminded of today. I couldn’t get the water to drain from this unit today, nothing I tried worked. I decided that the valve in the bottom of the bowl had stuck shut for whatever reason.
As I was unthreading the bowl I made a joke about it blowing up. Bear in mind it showed 0 air pressure, I’d even hooked up a blow gun on the out put and blew air through it until none came out.
As the last of the threads cleared the housing a blast of 175 psi main air line pressure shot out of the bowl area. How the bowl didn’t smash against the floor and shatter is beyond me.
The noise was deafening and eight hours later, my ears still hurt. Had the blast hit my bare skin it could have caused serious issues and there are so many other things that could have gone wrong. I wasn’t wearing safety glasses, there wasn’t supposed to have been any air so no danger.
Or so I thought. I had worked on other similar regulators that had no air flowing after having shut the pressure down. Luckily I was able to lock some vice grips on a rubber line to get the pressure shut down. I was then able to find the o-ring and get it put back together.
I feel really stupid but also really luck that no real damge or injuries occured. I’m not holding myself up as a saftey expert just sharing a very real incident that happened to me in hopes it won’t happen to someone else.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and may your ventures be met with sucess!
Slocum's Creak 