Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I bought a new Brock bin two years ago and purchased it with their permanent sweep setup. This is a 36 foot bin.
I have only cleaned out the bin once but it seems to work fine. The unloading sequence is to use the center dump and unload the bin without engaging the sweep until the grain quits running. Then open the outer gates (they are interconnected on a single rod) until the grain quits running again. Then engage the sweep to clean the rest of the bin through the center dump. The sweep needs to be positioned close to the outer gates before filling the bin so that it is pretty well out in the open when you engage it.
I did have one problem which I should mention. The center pit is covered with a grate system for safety. This grid system can be a problem if chunks work their way down to the bottom and plug over the grate. Most users cut some or all of the grate cross bars off before filling. The installers can not do this by law, but the user can. I forgot to do this and had some frozen chunks work their way down and block off my center pit.
I had removed a fair amount of corn before this happened but the bin was still 3/4 full when the flow stopped completely. I could have removed the rest of the bin through the outer gates but I was afraid that the bin could suffer damage due to the fact that the grain would be unloaded mostly from one side. Since the outer gates were interconnected it was not possible to just open the second to the center gate by itself.
What we ended up doing worked quite well. We found a piece of PVC pipe that would mate up with the suction hose on the Grain Vac. We removed the auger flighting from the bin and stuck the PVC pipe into the tube in an attempt to get close the second from the center gate opening. The idea was to empty the bin from the second gate but not take any grain out of the other gates which would open at the same time. The PVC pipe would block grain from flowing from the outer gates which would be open at that time.
This really worked quite well and the time to load a truck was not much greater than with the auger system. Once the grain was mostly removed I crawled in the bin and removed the chunks from the center grate and went back to the original system with the auger and eventually the sweep.
We cut out the grate so that this should not happen again this year. I have not completely emptied the bin yet this year. Hopefully I won't need the PVC pipe trick although it did work well.
I had all kinds of advice from cutting a hole in the opposite side of the bin to explosives. The PVC pipe trick was a better alternative. |
Sweep Auger
