I just bought my first air compressor. The manual says to turn the regulator all the way down when you turn the compressor on and then to turn it up when you want to use the air but it doesn’t say how high.
If I want to fill my tires to 35psi, do I just set the regulator to 35? Or do I set it higher so the tires fill faster?
Uh. How, though? The regulator is on the output end and has nothing whatsoever to do with how the motor and pistons put air into the tank. The compressor is going to pressurize its tank up to its pressure shutoff setpoint as fast as and indeed at the only speed it’s capable of running. If the pressure setpoint is even adjustable (it probably isn’t), diddling with that is only going to accomplish making your motor start and stop a bunch of times as you stairstep it up to whatever your maximum pressure is.
Big time commercial or industrial compressors rated for constant duty cycles may and sometimes do have variable speed motors, but I’ve never seen a consumer model with one.
Ya, I was thinking about it after I wrote it and it doesn’t make any sense. The compressor is empty when you start so there’s no load, and it gradually increases. The regulator is never going to get dicked around with ever again, so what’s the point? Maybe to let moisture out? Metal shavings? Sounds like dumb instructions that everyone will ignore. Maybe it’s a way to void the warrenty? “Sorry to hear your brand new compressor shit the bed, did you remember to fuck around with the regulator on startup? No? Sorry, we can’t help you”
I’m also poised to agree: setting the output air regulator to a low value does not change the reserve pressure in the tank. I suspect maybe Peppycito thought OP was talking about the governor, which is what controls when the pump turns on and off.
But even then, the most common design of governor only adjusts the peak reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns off) but the minimum reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns on) is usually a fixed value subtracted from the peak reserve. Usually the control for this is inside a box and turned by a screwdriver, because of how rare it is to adjust the reserve pressure.
That said, there is genuine merit in reducing the reserve pressure, if there’s an explicit objective to prolong the life of the pump as much as possible and the air loads are not very significant. But this usually isn’t the case for small residential air compressors, because those pumps tend to be built very small and thus oversubscribed.