Fill Bins With A Grain Vac

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Jason Finnie of Portage la Prairie, Man., uses a pneumatic grain vac –a Thor conveyair model –to fill this 90-foot Harvestore silo. Without this system,
he would not be able to use the silo for grain storage.

Jason Finnie of Portage la Prairie, Man., uses a grain vac to put wheat and oats into a 90-foot Harvestore silo. His is a

Thor Conveyair model, which vacuums grain up then blows it out with air pressure. Finnie connects his vac to a six-inch air-sealed pipe permanently fixed to the side of the silo. At the top, the pipe makes a right-angle turn and runs 12 feet horizontally to the middle of the silo where the grain drops in. Without a vac to do the job, Finnie could not have made full use of this silo for grain storage.

They Finnies used to run a dairy and still have three Harvestore silos on their farm. The use one for high-moisture barley, which goes to the cattle in their 1,000-head feedlot. They added aeration and sweep augers to the other two — a 60-footer and the 90-footer mentioned at the top — in 2000 and converted them to giant grain bins. The question was how to fill them. The longest auger on the market could fill the 60-footer, but not the taller one. Some farmers have cut holes in the side of too-tall silos so they can fill them part full with an auger, but only a leg or a pneumatic system can reach to the top. The Finnies decided on the simple air system, which they could set up themself for lower cost.

“The cyclone at the top was a couple hundred bucks. The elbow was a couple hundred. Then you need couplers, which are more than the pipe itself. In the end, it was less than $2,000 per silo and we did the work ourselves,” he says.

Ray Guscette, owner of Grain Vacs Inc., in Clear Lake, Iowa, has set up “well over 100” old silos with air-fill systems. “Cattle have gone out of this area and we’ve got Harvestores sitting empty,” Guscette says. Working with Thor Conveyair and now Farm King, which bought Conveyair last year, Guscette converts silos into supersized grain storage bins just the way Finnie did.

Finnie says his grain vac can move oats at the same capacity as a 10-inch auger. Wheat, being heavier, is slower. According to Farm King, its grain vac moves wheat to the top of a 90-foot silo at a rate of 1,700 to 1,800 bushels per hour.

Farm King repainted Thor Conveyair vacs red and named them Model 6640. Otherwise they’re the same as Finnie’s. Suggested retail price is $28,390 with a hose kit. It requires a minimum 110 PTO horsepower tractor. The key feature remains the air lock, a low rpm rotary valve that transfers grain from the vacuum side of the system to the pressure side.

Some grain vacs suck grain into a central chamber and then discharge into the truck with a short length of auger. The air lock system with pneumatic discharge gives you more flexibility in how far you can move the grain. Discharge pipe can also go around corners, so you can fill bins in a more confined space than you could with an auger.

Walinga of Guelph, Ont., has been making pneumatic grain vacs for decades. I asked company sales manager Tom Linde if farm-

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