on today's video we're going to be doing a hydrostatic pressure test on the 60 gallon
ingersoll ram tank using my pressure cleaner and our valve gauge up to 300 psi so stay tuned
hey guys welcome back to the channel so i recently acquired this 60 gallon ingersoll rank
air compressor from my office we had a lab that they had this and it's been abandoned for about
12 years it was a 2003 model and i haven't seen it used ever since i started working at the office
and since we're moving the offices they were going to get rid of it so i decided to take it home and
refurb it i already upgraded all the valves i put a coat of paint on here this thing was sitting
outside under a canopy for the last decade or more luckily for me someone took the drain valve
out of the bottom so it was never pressurized and any water or moisture just flowed out of it
but it still did have some surface rust and some oxidation i ended up buffing the tank making it
pretty clean one thing i forgot to do when i had it all taken apart was actually do a hydro
test on it a hydrostatic test is where you fill it up with water and then you pressure test it
up to 150 percent of the rated pressure of the tank so one of the reasons why you always want
to pressure test a tank especially a tank that you don't know the history about is that when it
stores air there's a lot of potential energy in that compressed air in here and you don't want
this tank rupturing or exploding or leaking on you when it's fully pressurized with air you use water
as a medium to do the hydro testing because water is not compressible so what you do is
you fill the water all the way up once you fill it up it's mostly full of water as the volume
and then you fill it up with a little bit of air and that little bit of air will build up pressure
really fast and if there is a leak or any kind of catastrophic failure of the tank that water won't
explode and it won't have much potential energy the most you'll do is spring a huge leak but it
won't kill you and it won't hurt you so that's why you do a hydrostatic test when i got this thing
i didn't even know about it until i started doing some more research and i found out how easy it was
to do a hydrostatic test at home so that's why we're doing it today as far as the psi you want
to test up to a lot of people test it to like a 1.2 if you really want to be safe you could
go up to a 1.5 this tank operates up to 175 psi on today's test i'm gonna jack it up to about 260 265
once i get it up there i'm gonna let it sit for a couple hours to see how well it holds the pressure
if there's any leaks or anything so here's the 300 psi gauge where the pressure regulator goes
i'm putting it right here for this experiment i still have my check valve right there which
i just recently replaced and i thread locked everything back together so i don't want to
take it apart it's also a good chance for me to test that out since it's rated for 500 psi
this right here is a half inch service valve and this is where i'm going to end up putting the
pressure washer on and filling it from here to get my pressure up ended up putting a nipple that's
designed for a pressure hose nozzle because it's a little bit different than your normal air nipple
as part of the tank refurb i ended up putting this remote drain line right here that goes into
the middle so i could drain it from the side with a little ball valve right there other than that
the rest of the refurb of this was replacing the two run and start capacitors on the motor
changing the filter out here and just cleaning everything up and giving it a nice coat of paint
the belt was still pretty good so i kept the original belt that's on here if that thing
eventually breaks i'll end up having to replace that before i put this in service i plan to put an
after cooler on here using that d-rail oil cooler that everybody uses that's going to be my next
project on this once i get this testing done so right now i've got my pressure washer set up i've
got the hose wand and everything connected to that nipple this thing's closed right now once i turn
on the water pressure this thing should pressurize up to whatever the house water pressure is and
then i gotta start this thing up to actually get some pressure into here fill it up with water
let me just fill it up until i
don't hear it spinning anymore and we'll see what the pressure is before i start it up
so that quick burst actually got this thing over the 300 psi mark on the thing so i'm gonna
relieve a little bit of pressure and see if i get it down just to make sure that we
don't over pressurize it too much so i unscrewed that thing off of there i'm going to release the
that ticket down for a little bit
okay so it's 270 now so we'll leave at 270 lock it there and then take this off
so see we got the pressure down to 270 i'll let it sit here for a couple hours and see if
it drops any once it passes that test we go ahead and drain the water out of here and call it a day
so let this baby sit for about six hours now and it's dark outside and it hasn't lost a single psi
it's up at 270 where i left it off so i'm gonna go ahead and relieve the pressure now and just
empty this tank you can see right now why you use water as a median to test this because water
doesn't compress so the really the only pressure in there is a small amount of air pressure that's
got the air pocket so once you release it that's all the drop that you're going to get
that's basically it now it's free-flowing and then this is just gravity letting it drip
drop down to no pressure in the tank right here while it's dripping
thanks for joining me on this quick video on how to do the hydrostatic testing on this tank
as you can see it's a pretty straightforward process using that pressure cleaner
other people use different methods i think there's a method where you can use a grease gun
where you pump the grease gun into the fitting onto here and pump it up to get the same pressure
plumbers have a special hand tool they also pump also to test lines when they do actual plumbing
work but for my case since i didn't have either of those tools the pressure cleaner was the next
best thing and it's readily available and easy to use so if you found this video useful give it a
thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to my channel already for all my different diy videos around the
house in the car or in the garage go ahead and subscribe to your channel i try to keep up with
all my diy videos every time i do something for all these different projects if i can do it you
guys can do it too so i want to thank you for watching and i'll talk to you guys next time
you