PE4F Pumping at Full Vacuum

PE4F stands for PEforFun, a member here. There has been some interest in his pumping routine lately, and I have been using it on and off for about two and a half years.

This is his profile: PEforFun

He had decent gains doing manual PE for about 5 years if my memory serves me, and then he greatly accelerated his gains rate using a new style of pumping. To put it simply, he drilled a small hole near the top of the tube, to be used as a thumb-hole release valve. Then he hooked the tube up to an HVAC pump, which provides a constant and powerful suction. This pump has the ability to pull a full vacuum (for our purposes) within a couple seconds. Thus, one can enter the tube, and by placing the thumb on the thumb-hole, pull a full vacuum in about 2 seconds. And also instantly release the pressure by removing the thumb.

My personal experience with the method has shown it to be a safe and effective form of PE. No doubt many pumpers would find it useful to incorporate full vacuum forces into their routines, provided it can be done safely. However, using a traditional hand pump and standard routine, going above 10 or even 15”Hg of pressure is tempting injury, or at the very least requiring an incredible amount of conditioning.

So there is a great deal of misunderstanding about PE4F pumping. PEforFun himself posted excellent instructions on how to do his routine, which I advise anybody interested in the method to read over carefully - by clicking the “read all posts by PEforFun” link in his profile. There aren’t many posts and they are all on topic to the method. In this thread, I’m going to add some of my own observations, to make this new style of pumping more accessible.

I have not experienced the same fast gains he did from the method, but it has been effective. And fun.

Hey BD do you know what pressure you get by using this system? Is it possible to track that?

Just out of curiosity.

I read that you have to enter the tube flaccid right?

If it’s a pressure of up to 15hg I can reach that with my hand pump and handle it for like 5-10s. The problem is for pressures beyond that.

How long have you been doing this routine?

Thanks

An a/c vacuum pump will pull around 30, in 5-10 seconds, on an a/c system … greater volume to evac than a cylinder.

It’s your dick good luck

I am strongly of the belief a gauge can easily be incorporated with plumbers putty and a second hole in the cylinder. Would you be willing to try applying one to your tube? It just seems like a good idea and I’m curious.

I would only consider it if a gauge was in the system so you can monitor the exact pressure to are pulsing to. Without a gauge, it is just way to easy to go way beyond safe limits and cause instant damage.

I like the idea of pulsing, just find a way to control what you are doing.

All the damage scene is with the eyes slowly building vacuum… maybe pulsing quickly is where girth is at, I’m not gonna guinea pig… playin devil advocate

kinda makes sense though

Stretching the Tunica

Useful info in this old post about tunica strength, the lower limit is about 50"hg.
The other thing to consider is the faster you apply a stretch the more connective tissue resists and is likely to tear.

If you are drawing the vacuum through a secondary hole wouldn’t just leaving the hand pump with it’s built in gauge in place pick up your vacuum? The gauge on the hand pump is measuring the vacuum of the system.

Maybe I am missing something here?

Lol, I will let others have fun with this one, please be careful fellows!

Never mind, I just realized the secondary hole is for manual release using thumb.

Great questions, these are exactly some of the confusions I wanted to address.

With PE4F pumping, we’re basically talking about pumping at 29”Hg, or within 1”Hg of whatever atmospheric pressure is at your location. The HVAC pumps are designed to pull a deep vacuum. And for our purposes, I’d say it pulls to within 1”Hg of full vacuum in about 1 to 2 seconds.

The pump I have, for instance, is advertised as being able to pull to within 15 microns Hg of a full vacuum. And the standard requirement when evacuating an AC system is to get below 500 microns. I watched several youtube videos of pump reviews, and just for general knowledge when I was starting out on this. It’s normal practice for an HVAC tech to have a electronic micron gauge hooked up to the line pressure. Most micron gauges begin to read at around 10,000 to 20,000 microns. And in these videos, when evacuating a A/C systems that are generally around 1 cubic meter of volume, the HVAC pumps pull to 10,000 or 20,000 microns Hg in about 15 seconds, as sweeternuts said. By comparison, the vacant space in our pump tube may be somewhere around a few hundred cubic centimeters, several thousand times less than an AC system (1 cubic meter = 1 million cubic centimeters). From there, they are then left on for anywhere from 5 to 30 more minutes depending on just how deep a vacuum the tech wants to draw. They might only leave it on for 1 to 5 minutes if they only need a 500 micron evacuation, depending on the size of the system. But it could be 30 minutes if they want a 15 micron Hg evacuation.

For reference, a micron, or micrometer, is 1 millionth of a meter. So getting to 20,000 microns, is the equivalent of getting to within 2 centimeters Hg of full vacuum. Or within 1”Hg of full vacuum.

So in practice, a gauge might tell you how fast you get to 29”Hg, whether it’s 1 or 2 or 3 seconds. But let there be no doubt about it, that is the pressure level achieved by PE4F pumping. Nearly a full vacuum, and whatever pressure that represents at your location (elevation dependent).

So with PE4F pumping, just assume you’re getting to full vacuum, or so reasonably close for our purposes that the force is more or less the same as full vacuum.

In normal pumping, we spend large amounts of time under force, so it’s important to carefully control the pressure.

In PE4F pumping, we spend the entire time under force at full vacuum, so it’s important to carefully control the time - which is what the thumb-hole release valve is for.

Now, I want to reiterate something PEforFun says in his posts, because I think it’s a very common misconception about pumping at 29-30”Hg. And that is that higher pressures cause a linear increase in the forces we’re putting on our penis, NOT exponential. Guys normally pump at 5”Hg. Well, going to 30”Hg is just 6 times the force. Nothing magical about it. It doesn’t make your dick explode.

The easiest way to think about the forces involved is to convert these pressures to PSI (pounds per square inch). Atmospheric pressure at sea level is about 14.5 psi. By multiplying the cross sectional area of whatever tube you’re using by atmospheric pressure, you get the force in pounds that is pulling on your dick. Essentially the equivalent amount of weight you’d be vac-hanging straight out, by pumping - if that analogy makes any sense.

Here are the forces at full vacuum for common sized tubes:
1.5” tube — 26 pounds
1.75” tube — 35 pounds
2.0” tube — 46 pounds
2.25” tube — 58 pounds
2.5” tube — 71 pounds

This is also the force that the tube is digging into the pubic bone. With a 1.5” tube I didn’t find this to be much of a problem. A minor annoyance at worst. However with the 1.75” tube I’m now using, padding was a requirement.

Now this is something I didn’t know. I honestly assumed that any time you ran the max it would be a static amount of pressure. Even though academically I knew that was wrong, I didn’t know how to calculate upwards for that and the idea was “29-30HG is 29-30HG regardless of tube size”

Now my question becomes, if you did use a gauge, would it tell you anything different with different tube sizes? Or would it just be pegged in that 29-30HG range and be basically useless for exact pressure calculations?

Perhaps if done with a quick enough pulse cycle only micro tears, causing collagenous tissue fatigue, the force applied is more directed at blood inflow and expansion versus restriction of out flow, and expanding over time.

A guy packing a 1.5” tube at 30”Hg and a guy packing a 2.5” tube at 30” Hg have the same pressure. The gauge would read the same. Same force per unit of area. The 2.5” tube guy gets a higher overall force, but it’s distributed over a greater area as well. In a way, they are getting the same workout. I suppose it’s similar to the idea or debate about thicker guys needing to hang higher weights.

The vac hanger analogy isn’t perfect, I just wanted to illustrate that even with full vacuum pressure, we are dealing with finite and very specific forces. And that although certainly above the level of most PE methods, they are not in the range of hundreds of pounds or anything that will rip your dick off or explode it. In my experience significantly higher forces are possible by clamping. I’m just pulling a random guess out of my ass, but I’d venture to say I’ve achieved internal pressure at least 3 times greater via clamping than I have with PE4F pumping. Probably even higher.

So I guess I’ll go over some of the basics that PEforFun did in his posts, but I still highly recommend reading through them all. Don’t want anyone getting hurt on account of me putting out only half the info. I’ll get to my personal observations later.

Getting a pump.

The pump you want to get is called a “rotary vane HVAC vacuum pump.” Currently in 2017 there are super cheapo ones available for as little as $50 USD. I started on a cheap Robinair, it died on me after a few months. Then I got a much nicer JB Industries pump for $350 that will work until the day I die. I probably just got a bad unit with the cheap one, and they normally would work much longer. Just giving my honest review.

One feature I really like on the JBI is the isolation valve. I can modulate the flow to the pump with a lever, and essentially control how quickly the pump pulls the full vacuum. At low enough levels, it doesn’t even pull a full vacuum, and I get a partial pressure in the 5”Hg to 29”Hg range, even if I let it run for several minutes. I think it would be fairly easy to add your own isolation valve if you get a pump that doesn’t have one. Being able to control this makes it easy to do “warm-up” sets at lower pressures, because if you just go straight up to 30”Hg on the first set, it can be too intense.

CFM = cubic feet / minute

The pumps are rated at various CFM. This is how fast the pump draws air. My first pump was a 1.5 CFM, and my second pump is a 3.0 CFM. Both of them worked fine. If anything, I’d say going over 3.0 CFM is probably overkill. If you have an isolation valve that you can use to modulate the speed, it’s ok to go over. But if not, the higher CFM pumps will get to 30”Hg faster, and it can be harder to do the “warm-up” sets. If you do accidentally get too much power, and no isolation valve, you can use partial closure on the thumb hole to modulate this and do your warm-up sets that way.

Pump oil.

These pumps are designed to evacuate AC systems, and pull refrigerant, moisture, and anything else that goes through the tube into the pump. So they need vacuum pump oil, and regular oil changes. Since we’re not actually draining anything through the oil, except maybe tiny amounts of lube that gets through - the oil stays cleaner longer than it would when being used on an HVAC job. I change mine after 20-50 workouts I’d say. An HVAC tech would drain it every 1-3 jobs. The more often you change the oil, the longer the pump will last, and the deeper vacuum it will continue to pull. Since we don’t really care whether our pump can still pull a 15 micron vacuum, and even a 10,000 micron vacuum is fine for us, it’s not as big a deal.

Drilling the hole.

I actually whittled mine. The release valve hole goes in the side of the tube, near the top (above the level the tip of your penis will reach to). Anywhere in the top inch of the tube should be fine. PEforFun recommended a 1/8” diameter hole. That’s a good size. You can start small, and increase the size if necessary. Basically, when you have the pump on at full power, and you’re in the tube, and the thumb hole is NOT covered, there will be some partial pressure in the tube. The pump draws air faster than it can get in the thumb hole opening. And the size of that hole, along with the CFM rating of the pump, will determine how high this minimum partial pressure is. If it’s above say 5”Hg, it might be uncomfortable when starting out. It’s also good to have it be low because during these workouts, after some time at full vacuum, when you take your thumb off the hole, you want that to be time at rest. And if you’re still at 5”Hg, that’s not really rest. So if it’s too small, and the minimum pressure is too high, you widen the thumb hole a bit. A wider, or longer thumb hole will make it easier to modulate the pressure by partially covering the hole. However, too big, and you could give your thumb a hickey.

In the same way that different tube sizes translate to different overall forces at the same pressure, the force on your thumb at the thumb hole is very small. A 1/8” diameter hole at 14.5 psi has an overall force of only 0.05 pounds on the thumb.

The lube.

I highly recommend vaseline, or similar thick lube that does not need to be re-applied. I’m again just going over PEforFun’s instructions here. But my own experience bears it out. Water based lube evaporates and dries out very quickly at high pressure. Additionally, as I’ll get to eventually, you may be going in and out of the tube many times per workout, further depleting your lube. And on top of all that, I think vaseline doesn’t get sucked through the pump at all. It stays in the tube entirely, keeping the oil cleaner. So I like vaseline. I clean out the tube after several uses. Contrary to some popular PE myth, it has done absolutely zero damage to my tubes, after 2.5 years of pumping like this.