Commonly known as slurry ring, suction ring, water trap, slurry collector, so how good do they work? We go through the positives and negatives of using them.
As their name says, they remove the water, slurry from the process of core drilling when wet drilling.
First of all, you need a wet vacuum for these to work, which is no problem. Basically, you connect the slurry ring to the wet vac, turn the vac on and place the slurry ring around the mark where you want to drill. Instantly, it will suck down to the ground. You can then drill your hole.
Please note this blog is referring to the suction rings and wet / dry vacuum that we sell as other types are unknown and untested by us.
Depending on the amount of water used by the operator these suction rings work amazingly great. They catch around 99% of the water and allow very little to no clean up after the hole has been drilled.
Applications where it would be perfect to use this set up would be if drilling close to the edge of a pool, on a high-rise balcony, on top of a retaining wall etc. Obviously in these cases, workplace health and safety needs to be considered as well as avoiding stains and mess from the slurry.
In general, without the use of a wet vac and suction ring, the excess water / slurry is cleaned up with a good pressured hose and swept away, but cannot always be done easily and efficiently.
The only downside to using a wet vac and slurry collector is it adds extra items to the core drilling process to move from hole to hole. The other downside is the amount of water the wet vac can hold (ours we stock is a 70L which eliminates emptying regularly). However, the upside is there is no mess to clean up at the end (or very little).
In conclusion, it depends on the application and any health and safety requirements to whether it is necessary to use a slurry collector. If you want no mess to clean up or you are happy to spend a few minutes cleaning up afterwards.