Although it is not a competition, I appreciate the praise. I chat with Stephen (Big Red) a couple of times a month, and he is doing some really neat things with his new tank. I haven't kept up 100% with his new tank, but I would hazard a guess that it's progress would rival what we have been able to accomplish so far with our tank
.
Time for a short update :
I was able to resolve my RO/DI woes. It turns out that the 1st RO unit, that we got from an LfS, was actually an Ultratec Poseidon (go figure that the LFS would actually carry a decent unit ?
). So I was able to get the diagrams from their web site about how to connect the various fittings on the membrane chamber and it also turns out that it already has a built in auto-shut off (which make me wonder why I bothered to buy that 3rd party auto-shut off kit for it a couple of years ago ? *sigh*). So I took the membrane housing from the Poseidon and put it onto the RO/DI unit to add DI to the water filtration. And I found the leak in the DI chamber when the auto-top off pressurized.. it was the fitting itself.. it didn't have any teflon tape or otehr thread "sealant", so I removed it, added 2 wraps fo teflon tape and reinstalled it. All teste of the unit, water production and auto-shut off were successful, without any leaks. I am still re-thinking it's placement, but that is not a big deal at the moment, the important thing is that it is making water at a pretty good pace (especially important since our top off reservoir was empty, since this morning). The unit is filling our top off reservoir as we speak
I also plumbed up all that I could with the new skimmer, including getting the inlet plumbed from the drains, all I need now is the other half of the union that Scott is sending me that should get here on Tuesday.
Well, just when everything is starting to come together, I guess that it is inevitable that something will fall apart. I just had a Vortec driver fail on me. I was out working near the tank getting the skimmer plumbing finished up and I heard the Vortec pump make this odd clicking noise, then the driver started blinking red. I shut off power to the driver, inspected the pump and restored power to the driver.. the green light came on very very dimly, and the pump never came back on. There was an odd brown fluid that came out of the driver through the motor connection cable opening. I opened up the driver and all around the circuit board where the LEDs connected there was that same brown fluid.. not watery, a little thicker than that, and it had a sharp, acidic smell. I guess I will be contacting Icecap first things Monday to see about a replacement. This was also one of the motors that had been running hotter than our other ones (other avg 80, this one ran around 110, IIRC). From what IC told me before, this was nothing to be concerned about, but it makes me wonder if it was a factor in our recent driver failure ?
