Has anyone had experience using gate valves, like those supplied by Valterra in the USA, for their gunge tanks?

http://www.valterra.com/industrial-valves/

Of particular interest to me are the actuated/electric motor driven gate valves.....

As examples:

They take a long time to open, you would have lost all of the gunge by the time they'd opened fully!

I would be tempted to build something a bit more homemade. A lot of gungetanks have a bathtub style arrangement where pulling the chain pulls the plug out of a hole. Why not automate that? I think that an air compressor and air ram with that kind of arrangement would be better than trying to go with an electric motor as it will be much faster.

A solenoid would be more appropriate for controlling the flow electronically:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solenoid_valve

Or a butterfly valve for controlling it manually:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_valve

Those valves are used on the grey and blackwater tanks of pretty much camper (caravan for you non-US Americans) on the road. I'm not sure why you would think a valve designed to hold in, then let 50+ gallons of shitwater come out of a 3 or 4" hole would be slow or otherwise inappropriate for dumping some slime out of a box...

The product description says that they take 5-10 seconds to open. That's pretty slow! Most gungetank gungings only last a few seconds, the valve probably won't be open before the gunge has all gone.

Yeah, they don't take anywhere near that long, at least the directly-operated ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SWtXuDza50

it takes at least a minute in my tank - I can make it take longer too. thick gunge and loads of it

It would be nice to hear from Messytomandemily as their gunge tank uses a manually operated gate valve. The pics below are from their profile.

The gate valves would probably work but over complicates things. Its something else to go wrong have an air or electric valve. When we built our tanks we looked at these mechanisms and there was a thread either on here or fetlife about gunge tank valves. Another issue is you really don't want to be mixing electric and gunge (water) together.
Timing wise, 5 - 10 secs is not a major issue, our tank certainly runs well over a minute, particularly with thicker gunge. The other issue is if you want to close the valve again I assume it will take as long to close the valve.

www.thegungeshop.com

Get me in it!

They're "electric" and run off a 12v battery. They're also explicitly designed to be used to hold back water.

You're not going to fucking get electrocuted.

Not everyone is bright enough to use a battery !!

We did an event a while back with another Gunge Tank as they needed 2 and the operator had lights shinning into the tank from the top. They were 12v so all safe, however they were being run from a 240v transformer that was covered in gunge by the end of the day.

There's nothing wrong with a butterfly valve with a lever attached to the side, and a string hanging down from the lever. Simple and effective.

I love seeing these wonky wam device engineering threads interspersed among the "Kym's Slimy Fucking Machine Orgy" posts.

We might actually be selling our newly refurbished tank in the not to distant future. Not used since we replaced the Perspex sides and painted it last year.

You wire it to a switch. It's 12V DC. There are two wires. It's the opposite of complex.