Hello all. Thought I'd share a few things...
Starting out, doing several batches at a time, I tried following the instructions to a "T", racking into the carboy after 7-10 days. I ended up with several carboys foaming out overnight and that is NOT fun at all, especially when it goes underneath you wood flooring or carpet.
Some of the kits I was doing had oak chips and grape skins but did not come with a muslin bag to use so I learned the hard way that adding them loose in the primary can make racking quite difficult. I spent a fair amount of time using a colander and screen on those batches.
Next, I tried adding the oak to the carboy after racking and that also contributed to the foaming problems. Finally, I talked to George (RIP) at FineVineWines in Dallas who helped me understand what I was doing wrong and sold me some muslin bags. He also explained that it's good to occasionally wring out the bag of skins and oak into the must.
After that I started leaving everything in the primary (buckets) for about a month. I've left some batches in the primary longer, up to about 6 weeks, and never had any problems with oxidation. I would take the lid off and stir the top down about once per week just to make sure the was no mold developing or anything.
Over the next year I had done about a hundred or so batches. During that time I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the whole clearing thing. I spent a lot of time on filtering with various degrees of success. Made a mess of the kitchen a couple times when the filter would clog and spray all over the place. Turns out that it's true what they say, you should not try to filter wine that hasn't cleared. The only answer seemed to be more time.
Eventually, I graduated to using 300L tanks for my primary then racking to carboys. I would carefully pump 10 or 12 batches from the tank into carboys adding the stabilizers and fining agents to each individually, mixing and waiting in between steps as per instructions.
I would put the carboys on the shelf side by side and I started noticing that they didn't all clear at the same rate. Naturally, the last one out would have more sediment as I was trying to get the last of the wine from the tank, but that didn't mean it would be the last to clear. Some carboys would clear in a week while others took two or three weeks or even longer. I started researching online and I ran across the All-In-One vacuum pump. I called and talked to Steve, the owner, about it and we discussed a little bit about degassing. I had only used a whip and drill up to that point and that was more toward the end of the process prior to bottling. I hadn't really thought of it as having anything to do with the clearing process. Steve explained that by using vacuum to rack the wine you were able to degas as you rack. I ordered one and tried it and right away I noticed a difference.
I got back on the phone with Steve and he told me he had another thing called a "head space eliminator" for $12 each so I ordered a few to try. It's a rubber bung with a one-way suction port and a rubber bulb which serves to indicate that the seal is good.
I first tried them on some finished batches to see how much gas was in them. I was amazed to see the wine appear to boil as the vacuum built up. Then I watched it continue to do so hours on some. I had about 80 carboys on the shelf at the time and over the next few days I worked my way through all of them. Only a few of them did not bubble up profusely. I ordered a bunch more of them and started leaving them on the carboys to reduce the air in the head space.
Next, I started using them to completely degas the wine upon the first racking. That's when I saw the most dramatic affect. In fact, some carboys would clear overnight while others, even from the same tank, still took a little longer but typically not more than a week. Since then I've been using the vacuum pump this way on several hundred more batches and it has made life a lot easier for me.
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