Sunday, November 06, 2011

In todays homekeeper tips,

a while back my Foodsaver crapped out; the vacuum pump wouldn't vacuum, which meant it wouldn't seal. This one only lasted about a year and a half, and the new ones are even more spendy. Plus the cost of their bags/rolls of material... So decided to try the Ziploc vacuum bags; the bags come in quart and gallon sizes, and use a hand pump to suck out the air. The bags are washable and reusable.

So far, quite good. You could wash out and reuse a Foodsaver bag a time or two, but since you had to cut it open each time the bag got smaller each time; these you don't have to cut. The one thing I did find is that if you vacuum the bag, let the pressure in the pump drop and then lift the pump, there's a tendency for some valves to leak. If you pull the vacuum, give one last pump and then lift the pump so it 'pops' off the valve, the seal seals much better.

The bad thing: if you want to vacuum-seal a gun for storage, you're stuck with handguns, as they don't have 'make your own bag' rolls of the stuff.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've been using those for short term storage. For primers, I store mine long term in 50 cal ammo cans with desiccant. I'll pull a 1K box or two and vac them in the ziplocs. When it's time to load some rounds I pull what I need and reseal.

I tried using the ziplocs for longer term stuff, but pretty much all my bags lost their suck after a month or three.