As the title said, is there a magical periodic process or constant removal system that really works, and may work with our machines? I don't mean just work, but work really, really well with little headaches. A little back story. We have a couple Flow Mach III machines which run nearly 7 hours each day. In the past, once the garnet gets pretty full we would have a company come in with a backhoe and scoop it out. It takes about a day and $1200. The problem with the backhoe is, they keep banging up the ceiling, freshly renovated, btw, hitting the tank (causing it to move and need repositioned), and when they are done, leave a mess all over the place, requiring a few extra hours of cleanup. That got old, so we decided to try to have a pump truck come out and suck up the garnet. That seemed to work pretty well, about a day, and roughly the same cost. The 2nd time they came out they charged us $2500, and said that the steel drops gave them a bunch of problems and put holes in their flex tubes. We don't really have room for a big retrofit extraction system like a conveyor system. We really can't have anything in the tank, due to the nature of what we cut. We often have jigs setup which only cut around a small area for hours and hours, it would eventually cut through anything below it. We were almost ready to give the Barton removal wand a shot, but someone from Flow said to stay away from them, I can't seem to find any discussion or reviews on this system. Anyone have a system that works well, I'd like to hear of them!?
-Mike