I never planned on using a pump for the same reasons listed, but I got an OLD Little Giant when I bought a lot of brewing equipment from some guy on craigslist (mainly I wanted his keggles and grainmill). After using it twice I could not do without it. I put my mashtun on a 4-ft stack of concrete blocks for gravity draining (I stir standing on a stool( and only use the pump for moving scalding water up to the MLT. Once the boil is on, the still-clean pump and HLT keg go back in the shed. As each gyle comes off the boil I chill with my IC and lift the pot onto the blocks and whirlpool. I use 8-gal turkey fryer pots and boil each gyle seperately, even if combining them all equally into one beer (say, 10 gallons of porter). I plan on doing a lot of English style parti-gyles, but to this point I've only collected data on the gravities of the runnoffs and split equally between my Better Bottles.
This has worked really well for me. Now I can brew 10- or 15-gallon batches without a huge equipment investment over my previous setup. The whole thing was possible, though, because of my craigslist find--2 kegs with bulkheads already welded in, and this old pump.
