Bulkhead broke on me. AHHHH!

[user 26995]

Almost had a catastrophe. last sunday all of a sudden my return pump started pumping microbubbles into the tank. I was planning on replacing the pump anyway. I wanted to put a couple ehiem pumps in the sump instead of the external pump. so I ended up doing it today. While taking the pump off, this is what I found. This is the bulkhead that the pump was attached to. If the whole piece had broken off it would have pulled away from the sump and emptied over 50 gals of water on the floor. And you know it would have happened while we were gone and the pump would have run dry, siezed and started a fire. Yay!
Pretty sure it was vibration that did this. I knew it would happen, just kept putting off changing it.

Lesson is, hook equipment up to schedule 80 bulkheads! and dont hook them up solid. use a hose!

 

[user 26995]

Amazingly enough, you know I didnt have a single drop of water leak from this.

 

[N1Husker]

You got lucky, Lorrie. Did you lose power today? We lost ours at 9:30 am and just got it back at 9:30 tonight. We have a generator thank goodness.

 

[user 26995]

no surprisingly enough we didnt. it cut out a couple times for just a few seconds, but that was it!

 

[N1Husker]

Ours cut out a couple of times around 8 am and then I took my wife to the farmers market so she could sell her glass art and when I got back it was out at about 9:30 am. There were a couple of dead trees that fell on some power lines , so they got them cut up fairly quickly but it took awhile to get power restored.

 

[mfinn]

Glad you there.
Having something like that break when you're not around sucks.

A couple years ago I cleaned a closed loop pump and put it back in service on a Sunday afternoon. Monday morning I woke up to 30-40 gallons of water on my dining room floor and 8' into my living room carpet. I tightened a pvc fitting too much and it cracked during the night.

 

[elmexotics]

Wow. Glad you caught that when you did. Would of not been a pretty picture.

 

[Peppie]

Some people have all the luck!!!

Great advise!

 

[user 26995]

Yeah it was luck that it hung on as long as it did after it broke.

I knew I was going to eventually have to replace it. I knew it shouldn't have been hard plumbed and the vibration would probably do that, but I procrastinated and it was almost a disaster.

 

[Mark2]

It could have been the vibration on an over tightened bulk head. Not tight is bad, but too tight is bad too. The rubber seal most likely didn't have any play to absorb excess movement.