The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Tool Chest Air compressor plumbing question

I finally got myself a nice air compressor and plumbed everything up tonight. After the filter and regulator I put a "T" in the line, one branch goes to the connector for my non-lubricated air and the other branch goes to the drip-style lubricator for the branch for my air tools.

I noticed that when I was using the blow gun plugged into my non-lubricated line that it caused the lubricator to release a couple drops of oil. Is it possible for the air to syphon the oil backwards out of the lubricator and contaminate my clean air line?

Thanks,
Aaron

Yes. With the blow gun closed the pressure in both sides is the same, when you open the blow gun the pressure drops on that side, so you can get a quick momentary backflow from the other side. Solution is to add a valve on each side and keep one side closed while the other side is in use.

Thanks for the help! My original plan was to put a ball valve between the T and the lubricator just in case this might be an issue, I guess I should've followed my instinct on that.

Aaron

Did you put a drop pipe in the line coming frm the compressor? It's puprpose is to remove the collected moisture in the air from the compressor before it goes through the regulator. Hope I explained that correctly but if anyone needs to see what I mean I'll post a photo link of mine. It does seem to help but it doesn't drain the main air pressure tank.

Excellent diagram. We would also recommend using tees for all those couplings, and using crosses for tees. Point the tees upward for when you need to add taps into the main line at some later date. Someday in the future you will be glad you did.

Mar-Ktech

IF I understand their drawing and
IF there is no relief on the package compressor tank
THEN
I believe they made a serious error in the drawing. There should be no valve between the compressor and the relief valve.

Dan Bentler

There is or should always be a relief valve on the compressor tank. They show one on the pipe system as well and I took that to be a second or extra one.

Grigg