Today’s AVweb has an article about vacuum pump alternatives, in which it takes a kind of interesting (but strange) view that for ultimate backup, just get an SR22… (you’ll see what I mean).
Here’s the paragraph. For the whole article, see Vacuum Pump Substitutes From $500 To $300,000
(276,600 - ?,???,???)
It makes you nervous even to have a vacuum pump installed in your plane? Yes, you still have options.
Until recently, you pretty much had to step up to turbine-powered aircraft to find instrument systems that relied solely on redundant electrical power. Recently, however, http://www.cirrusdesign.com/Cirrus Design made vacuumless flight available to the common man when it introduced its Cirrus SR-22. The SR-22’s all-electric flight control panel is powered by a dual-battery, dual-alternator, dual-bus electrical system. Priced at $276,600 in its basic configuration, the SR-22 certainly is not the least expensive alternative to the vacuum pump. On the other hand, its fully-electronic panel comes complete with a 3,400-lb./180-knot airplane.
While this option is of little comfort as a back-up system when your vacuum pump packs up for the night in your other airplane, the point is that you wouldn’t need that pump if you were flying the SR-22. Of course, having that vacuum pump and a vacuum-driven attitude indicator might come in handy some dark night when the electrical system fails.