Water and electricity don’t mix well. When you are in a wet basement type situation, you don’t want to worry about running electric cords to a pump. Even when you’re in a dry environment, finding an outlet and running a cord takes time. With Milwaukee’s M18 Cordless Fluid Transfer Pump you just don’t need to think about it anymore.
The Transfer Pump can be used for transferring water, grey water, brown water, or any fluid as long as it’s not flammable, but it can’t handle water with debris in it like waste water (blackwater). Common uses would be emptying a hot water heater before replacing it or emptying a toilet before removing it.
It’s mainly designed for water transfer. Once the Milwaukee M18 fluid transfer pump is officially announced, there will likely be a list of restrictions as to what you can and can’t use it for. But they said right off the bat that it cannot be used to transfer fuel or other flammable fluids, or water with solids.
See Also: Check out our other Milwaukee 2016 New Product Tool Previews
The pump is self-priming; you just connect the hose and press the button for it to get things going. It can move fluid at a rate of 7.5 gallons per min, and up to 180 gallons when powered by a single 3.0Ah battery.
That comes out to about a pint (16 oz) a second.
The battery compartment is under a lid on the right side of the pump, which can accommodate any M18 battery pack, even the larger High Demand 9.0Ah pack. This keeps the battery pack nice and dry.
The Milwaukee Redlink technology in the pump can detect when it’s pumping dry and shut it off in one minute. This means you can leave the transfer pump to empty out the water heater and go do other things. You don’t have to babysit it to make sure it’s not getting damaged by pumping dry.
The M18 Fluid Transfer Pump is due out in October 2016. According to Milwaukee the Transfer Pump will come with a 5 year warranty. We don’t have any pricing information yet, but Milwaukee says they’ll release details later this summer.
Here’s an intro video of the fluid transfer pump, courtesy of our friends at Tools in Action:
From the video, it seems that some maintenance is recommended – after 100 hours of pumping you should consider replacing the impellers, although it won’t always be the case.
This looks like a convenient tool for quickly emptying out water boilers, which is how it was demoed at Milwaukee’s media event. What else would you use it for?