Bulkhead drip woes

[fatoldsun]

I was messing with some of the mechanicals this weekend and I guess I dislodged something with my drain-line bulkhead because it is now drip-drip-dripping – so far the drip is running down the drain-line and into the sump so I’m hoping no harm/no foul and since I have seen a fair amount of salt creep deposited on the couplers and bends I assumed there was a very slow leak before but I wanted to float this to the group and see if anyone thought this was a concern or better yet – any solutions to try and stop it? I had a problem when I was first setting up the tank and I over tightened a bulkhead, destroying it in the process which lead to pulling my sump out and replacing both the drain and return. I’d rather avoid that now since removing the sump would disturb the R-DSB I have in the fuge. If I had reason to think this would lead to a catastrophe I would do that but like I said, it’s a last resort. So, I ask – thoughts? Oh – I tried a little plumbers-putty but I couldn’t keep the area dry enough for it to stay put. It doesn’t help that I have a very small access area under the stand – poor designing on my part

 

[Jcurry@wesketch]

Pull it apart and fix it now. It's not going to get any better with time.

 

[falconut]

Yeah, you're probably better off fixing it now. I've not sre what it looks like, but maybe you can just drain the water down to make the repair without fully disturbing your DSB.

 

[redfishbluefish]

I’m first going to jump to the assumption that you have rigid PVC pipe. If that is the case, the first thing that came to my feeble little mind was that there is torque on the pipe that is causing the bulkhead to leak. I would check this first.

And I apologize for suggestion number two, but I’ve seen this done wrong too many times. Regardless of how the bulkhead is installed (flange on the wet side or flange on the dry side….it doesn’t matter), the gasket ALWAYS goes on the flange side. If you put the gasket on the nut side, guaranteed it will leak.

And, after verifying the above two suggestions, I’d play with the nut to see if I could stop the leak. I’d actually loosen first, because I’ve found that folks tend to over-tighten the nuts, and that causes the gasket to crimp up, causing channels for water to leak out.

 

[jimroth]

I agree with everything Redfish said, I've had success tightening and/or moving the bulkhead to stop leakage. The only thing I wanted to add is that you need to be READY to do a plumbing repair when you start this. There is a goodpossibility it will get a lot worse right away and you will need to re-plumb it, have supplies (buckets, SW, cement, pipe, etc) handy and don't do it at 11:30 at night. I found out the hard way!

 

[fatoldsun]

paul - you have assumed correctly - rigid PVC and it’s tee’d off to the 75-80% to the filter sock / skimmer and 20-25% to the refugium. not a perfect shot but it happened to be on my phone:

as for there being torque on the bulkhead – I think that’s most likely the case – I’m not sure how I resolve that with this design – too much weight hanging from the bulkhead – I guess I could try to loosen and re-tighten the bulkhead but I will have to clean out the overflow – there’s a fair amount of sand that’s settled on the bottom and I’m sure that will be a problem if I loosen things. I also am overly cautious because the first time I had a problem, I panicked and pinched the gasket. I proceeded to damage the “nut” because the tighter I made it, the more it leaked and the more I tried to tighten it to stop it. Like I said I panicked. Anyway, I don’t like the fact that this is the second time in a year that I will have to re-do this. It’s just too stressful. Oh, and yes, thanks for the suggestion -- the gasket is, in fact, on the flange side. It was actually fairly dry for 7-8 months which supports the notion that something tweaked or stressed the bulkhead like you suggested.

Jim, thanks for the input – I made that mistake before too – well I was doing something else but I started the leak at about 2AM - hence the panic – fortunately I had nothing in the tank at that time – just sand and rock while it was cycling. Anyway, I went out and picked up a new 1’ bulkhead - THR was out of ¾” slip. I’m a dummy b/c I stopped in the Fish Factory and forgot to ask. I think I will wait and try a new plumbing plan – I will try and tighten the existing when I can deal with the problem – I.e., a Saturday morning and by morning I mean after 7AM.

Ok – well thanks all for the input - I will have to address this soon but I’ll wait until I can do it in a calm organized manner with the means to take a more aggressive approach and re-do the plumbing if need be.