Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Help choosing a 30 gal upright air compressor

I used to have a 30 gallon upright Craftsman that I liked well. I only rarely used pneumatic tools but when I did it generally kept up. I mainly used it for air and inflating tires. I prefer something slightly overkill on power as opposed to underpowered, and with low maintenance. I'm fine spending a little more for better quality.

If you have any experience positive or negative to help guide me here, I appreciate it.

I have a Puma compressor now.

It seems good.


It's a 5 horse, two stage 80 gallon though.

I run DeWalt but had good luck with Craftsman.

This one...buy the warranty then bring it back in two years and get a new one.

https://www.harborfreight.com/air-t...tical-shopauto-air-compressor-56403.html

Double post

LOL... I bought a 12 volt Puma a while back... 3 gallon truck unit... seems like a decent little thing. (Hearing some cussing over the ARB brand units... overload/heat stuff... not sure).

The 120 volt Harbor Freight vertical units are under 30 gallons, but they do OK for me... and they are CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!!!

Probably my next one... Maybe?

Big 2 or 3 stage unit someday (maybe dual tanks)... 3 phase possibly... once I get a FINAL shop. I hate short cycling anything. Needle scaler sucks a lot of air.

Big box stores sell China junk with fancy names...

Air can be a damn complex thing.

Fiddy;
Good morning, I hope the day's looking the way you need it to be weather wise and you're well.

When you say "air and inflating tires" it leaves it a wee bit open as to what the "air" portion might be, so here's from a lifetime of setting up shops and jobsites with compressors of all sizes from portable brad nail driving compressors that finish carpenters use to 50HP shop compressors.

Compressors - hopefully - are sold with the cubic feet per minute - CFM rating, a horsepower rating and then the tank size. This all matters a great deal depending on your intended usage.

Diaphragm compressors are typically cheaper and much louder than the traditional oil bath piston types.

The piston types are much heavier if you're moving it often and if using a vertical tank are for sure top heavy.

As a really broad statement, piston type compressors are more money up front but in my experience will run much, much longer. They can sometimes be repaired too while diaphragm compressors typically are tougher to repair successfully.

If you want to run something like even a smaller orbital sander or buffer, they need a lot of CFM and as big of a tank as possible. The same goes for even a small spray paint setup even if they say it's an HVLP.

Nail guns usually don't require a bunch of air so less CFM and a smaller tank is fine.

If you want to for instance blow out your lawn irrigation in the fall, it's tank size we'll need so we have lots of volume, but we don't need super high PSI to do that.

For my home shop I ran an older 220V 6HP Craftsman for years - it was a strange dry piston setup that was super loud - on a 33 US gallon tank. It ran great until one piston let go and that was that. The tank was salvageable though.

It's replacement is a Porter Cable traditional piston type which is 5HP rated but 110V and a 25 US gallon tank. It's okay but doesn't have the jam when running a buffer or pot gun that the Craftsman had.

When running a pot gun or blowing out the irrigation I twin in the salvaged 33 gallon tank and that gives a bigger air reserve for those applications. It's the increased volume we get with the extra tank since we can't increase the pressure beyond whatever the compressor is producing right?

The air switch control died after I bought it and Porter Cable had discontinued those parts - up here anyways - but a local shop had a generic one that I was able to easily modify and it's running fine again. Parts for anything seem to be extremely hit and miss.

Hopefully that made some sense and was useful.

Good luck whichever way you decide and all the best.

Dwayne

Don't fall into the "s" cfm trap.


It's marketing BS.

The 60 ( or maybe 80) gal Quincy upright that Nrothern tool sells gets great reviews.

Used to be $1199. Prolly $1500+ now.

5 horse on 110?

How many amps that sucker draw???

also got a Puma , so does my son in law

its been the best Ive had

Cash;
Top of the morning to you my friend, I hope your part of the globe is looking good and you're all well.

We're getting a thunder storm this morning on another day of what has to be the coolest spring I can recall in living here nearly 40 years.

If you're so inclined, when you decide to set up air for your shop I'd be happy to go over what we've had work and what emphatically has not over the years.

As mentioned in life I set up and did maintenance on air systems 7 different shops.

They even sent me to a seminar or three for it and some of it stuck...

As a broad statement, if we're setting up a shop and we want to use air in different spots, we'll get best results if the air lines go around the entire shop - a joined loop as in - than if we just run lines to the point of usage.

The bigger the diameter of the lines, the more air storage we have and the more flow as well.

If you have areas where we're going to use a bunch of air, a satellite tank - we used to call them a "pig tank" - is always a bonus.

Hope that made sense and was useful to you or someone.

All the best regardless of your air compressor needs though sir.

Dwayne

Jim;
Morning my friend, I hope you and your fine family are well.

If the 5 HP on 110V query was aimed at me, I'll go take a look in the shop and put in the specs in an edit.

I tend to distrust some of the ratings on compressors because they frankly can't be true.

We'd have some jobsite compressors rated at say 5 HP that we needed to run a really heavy duty power cord to and a short one at that and then some that didn't, so there was no way they were drawing the same amperage.

I always meant to get one of the electricians to put a meter on them to see what the actual draw was, but didn't.

Off I go to see what I can see and will get back.

Dwayne

Edit specs.

The Porter Cable is a C5510 model with a D22620 pump.

The tag says120V/15A/60HZ/1PH which is supposed to supply 7.4CFM @40 PSI and 5.4CFM @ 90PSI

Personally I think the CFM rating is a tad optimistic.

I'll note it has a really, really stout and short power cord and has kicked the breaker off at least once when I was using it for an extended period.

The old Craftsman 220V spec sheet is gone, but it was on a 220V 15A breaker and did produce noticeably more air for sure.

I like the husky quiet model I have

I used to hold Speedaire in high regard... but two rotten tanks later... not so much.

The scuba diving concessionaire at Biscayne NP used to run old ballast tanks from subs (I think I am right)... super high pressure from a 3 stage compressor... very slick operation to fill up high pressure scuba tanks.

Very complex math... but a very cool set up.

Cash;
Morning once more sir, me again.

One of the shops I worked for a bit more than a year assembled these helicopter mounted water cannons.



They ran off of scuba or firefighter type Kevlar wrapped tanks.

We ran Honda 5HP gas motors for an onboard pump and then in the shop I had a 9HP Honda gas motor with a compressor that allowed me to run the tanks up to 4000PSI.

It was always something I was super careful with, that is to say dealing with those kind of pressures.

We'd run the high pressure lines into a manifold and regulate it to about 450PSI to drive the water cannons. That's 20 liters of water coming out of there at just under 500 FPS if I'm remembering the specs.

One evening when I was in the shop all alone figuring out something or other, an O-Ring on the 450PSI manifold which was just below my elbow let go. It was loud Cash!!!

Blew my clipboard across the shop and flat out ruined my ability to concentrate for that night!

On the bigger units it'd take close to an hour to empty the 4 tanks out so we could work on the system safely. Was a crazy loud hiss and super annoying pitch as well.

Thanks for the memories from long, long ago for me - 95 or so I want to say.

Dwayne

What ever you decide to buy, stay away from any compressors that do not use oil. Oilless sp? compressors are junk.

Buy one with twice the CFM capacity you think you need, and a minumum 50 gallon tank. Little air compressors with small tanks work themselves to death trying to keep up with any sort of high volume tools like air sanders, die grinders, or normal design paint spray guns. HVLP guns are a little better on air demand, but not much.

Thanks Dwayne... GREAT STUFF THERE.

A friend has similar to what you said (three buildings on one system)... BUT the loop and pig tanks are nothing I ever noticed or thought about. I will ask him more and you as well when I get going (year or so probably). I know he has huge volume.

He has a 2AM bleed-off (moisture)... or something like that being we are humid bad here sometimes.

His system is in schedule 40 pipe.

Do you think I could use Orange PEX 3/4"?

Just curious... I have lots of it and the tools...

Pipe threading... not so much stuff or skill.

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Side note... have you ever done a A/C belt driven system on a car/truck?

I like the idea... but then again a simple inverter/generator and 120v is also logical... gonna try and stay away from a motor driven compressor (too many gas engines to maintain already... and all that jazz).

Cash;
Good afternoon sir, thanks for the reply.

There is a type of flexible line that will pass code up here for pressurized air. The stuff we had was thicker than regular PEX and was blue.

Of course if your shop is going to inspected or you're using it commercially then the rules of the jurisdiction you're in have to apply.

If the shop isn't used for commercial purposes and you will not be inspected, I'll say that the rating for 3/4" Orange PEX should be just fine.

One thing I would do however is run the first say 20' off of the compressor black iron or something metal to act as a heat sink for the hot compressed air coming out of the compressor. We learned that one the hard way.

Actually you could run reinforced high pressure rubber too, which we did on a 40HP variable drive Kaeser in the last shop and that worked too. Just something to absorb and dissipate the hot air.

Don't forget a couple water traps there and then drain valves on the drop lines work well too.

But yes, a closed loop for the lines and if the shop is really big then a cross over line every 40' really smooths out the air flow measurably.

People don't do it because the initial setup cost is more, then they strain the tools and machines and work the compressors more by doing so.

Again I hope that made sense.

Dwayne