Upside Down Tank

[DanK13]

I never wear a seatbelt, I just don't use them. People blast me for it and I don't care. I have never been hurt in a car accident so I don't waste my brain cells worrying about it.

I said it before and i guess i'll have to say it again that I don't care what people say about check valves. Making it a part of check-in and proper maintenance is fine. I cant account for the laziness of others not keeping up with their equipment and having failure because of it. I don't understand the seatbelt comparison since there are far too many variables to consider to compare the two.

Dank: You may or may not care and you may or may not maintain your check valves. But the simple reality is that if you rely on a check valve to prevent flooding, then you are on the very short side of the odds. You can't cheat the physics or the probability, no matter how lucky you have been.

Thats your opinion and I respect opinions but I disagree.

Your false sense of security derived from luck and turning a blind eye to the facts with regard to check valves is rather congruent with your desire to move forward with an "upside down" tank. That is, to move forward with such a plan, you need to turn a blind eye to the the reality that the system will be hard (if not impossible) to maintain in a reasonable way AND no matter what measures are taken, there is an extremely high probabilty of system failure resulting in catastrophic consequences for the building, livestock and/or system components.

In other words, from a physics standpoint an "upside down" system will work just fine (when it is working). From a realistic standpoint, opperation and maintence of the system is riddled with problems. Just because we can do things does not mean we should.

Turn a blind eye? How so? What facts? So some people have had failures. Thats not my fault nor my history with using them. The system design may be hard and I won't deny that but with proper planning and set up correctly it shouldn't be impossible to implement and maintain. People have gone to space knowing the consequences and as long as they were aware of them they chose to go. I won't take it to that extreme but its definitely worth the time to attempt to design it.

It is not clear if this project is YOURS or for somebody else. If it is for you and in your space, have fun . If it is for somebody else, I certainly hope that you are very honest about the scope and probabilty of problems with every aspect of the system. Customers often trust the opinion of "experts" without realizing that the said expert "doesn't believe in seatbelts because they have never been hurt in an accident". Cases in point: Just about every system built on "tanked" is a real world nightmare that is either highly prone to catastrophic failure or nearly impossible to maintain. Don't be that guy (company).

Of course the consequences and potential problems are duly noted for this system but going with the same theory of noting all potential and probable problems would include silicone bonds releasing causing floods, bad pump seals causing floods, cracked skimmer seals causing floods, blocked overflows causing floods, pumps causing fires, a meteor falling through your house and hitting your tank resulting in a flood, etc. etc. etc. The list goes on forever. Not building a tank out of fear would prevent anyone from having one if they thought about all the possibilities of failure and not wanting water on their floor.

I have never seen Tanked nor will I since I have heard horror stories about that show and if this is an unmanageable system I wouldn't go through with it but if I can improve previous designs from the past and get it to a point where I can be comfortable that it will function without the fear of failure I will certainly build it.