Quote:
Originally Posted by
novahobbies http:///t/389056/taking-a-new-direction/340#post_3459610
Lookin' forward to those pics!!
What good build thread is complete without progress pics? I love to share pics and I feel like my picture taking skills have gotten much better over the past few months.... HOWEVER, if I were to post pics at this point, they would just be of a disassembled calcium reactor, a fried reactor circulation pump, a semi-frustrated picture of myself, and a picture of some high-test booze.
I started the day by fixing the leak on the circulation pump that I was struggling with a few weeks ago. As it turns out, there was a missing gasket of some sort and a spare O-Ring that I had laying around make a quick fix of the drip that was bothering me. So far so good.
I calibrated the pH controller and installed it into the reactor lid, rinsed the media really well, and played with the reactor in a bucket of fresh water (not only to purge the reactor of air, but also to tinker around with it before wrestling it into my sump). The instructions for the reactor that were e-mailed to me were of a smaller model reactor and had left out some lines so playing around with it in the bucket allowed me to figure out what did what.
I wrangled the full reactor into its spot in the sump, connected all the lines and figured out how to work the regulator ( I have a paralyzing fear of compressed gasses/liquids that made playing with the CO2 bottle especially diarrhea-inducing). Everything seemed to be running pretty well and the controller did what it was supposed to.
After about an hour, though, I stopped getting effluent
. After some tinkering the drips started to flow again. I thought that maybe the lines were getting temporarily occluded after having sat for so long. I took my daily afternoon nap (Janice snores like a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant and I don't get much sleep at night) and upon waking up my fish tank room smelled like a crack pipe (working in health care you are forced meet some very interesting people).
I called PCI and talked to Steve who has been extremely helpful in the recent past. I asked him if I made some wrong connections and he said that it sounded like everything was done okay. Apparently I either didn't purge all of the air in the reactor, or there was air leaking in somewhere and it all collected at the top of the reaction chamber not allowing water to flow back to the intake of the circulation pump. Luckily, he said he'd send me a new pump for cheap so what I'm taking away from this is a lesson learned in reactors and probably a pretty bad headache tomorrow.
