Had my first clogged line today.

No big deal, everybody plugs up from time to time. Just suck it back into the tank and start over again.

 

Just like a clogged artery or vein

 

LOL.,,anybody who says he's never plugged up probably hasn't been hauling bulk very long.
We tried hauling rock salt in pneumatics and it was a total disaster. That stuff will plug in a heartbeat.
The moisture content was higher than we were told and everybody who loaded it that day wound up plugged solid. Hoses, valves, couplers,everything was solid salt.
We wound up unbolting the bottoms of the tanks and gravity dropping. We ran the vibrators full on and drove around and around in tight circles leaving little windrows of clumps of salt behind that were scooped up by a front end loader.
To clean the hoses we jetted water into them until all the salt melted.
Never again.

 

What causes a plugged line? Is it trying to push too much material through at once?

 

Either that or the bin you’re trying to unload into is full. Can also be caused by some mechanical failure, major air leak, etc.

 

Basically, yes. The distance you're pumping, whether it's horizontal or vertical, and the height of the silo play into it to.
Watch your hose and watch your gauges. If the hose isn't moving a little or if the tank pressure starts up you can cut your product valve back a little, blast your hose with air, and maybe stop a plug before it gets bad.
Some plants, and a lot of redi-mix plants are bad for this, don't replace their plumbing until it's plugged solid. You can be doing everything right but if you have a high vertical rise, a lot of 90 degree bends in the plumbing, and pipes with years of buildup you can still plug up.
Some materials are more prone to plugging than others. I haven't hauled a lot of the exotic stuff that some guys on this forum haul. Mine is mostly cement and flyash which are pretty easy to unload.
But...we also hauled popcorn lime, dairy feed, rice bran, ammonium nitrate prill for explosives, fish meal, and a couple of other things that I'd just as soon we never hauled again. Fish meal was a disaster because it had a moisture content that wasn't appent when you loaded it. Same with rock salt.
I don't mean to sound like the world's biggest expert on this stuff. I drove pneumatic for a couple of years and we have two of them at the company I'm with. Some of the other guys on here can give you plenty of good advice about stuff that I don't know anything about.

 

I don’t haul pneumatic, but it sounds like there is a lot that can go wrong

 

This is more my style these days.