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Old 03-26-2012, 01:46 AM
GpsFrontier GpsFrontier is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Lake Havasu AZ.
Posts: 1,855
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I meant to post this update days ago, but better late than never. Anyhow I'm not sure if I mentioned it or not but I have all the PVC pluming in place and glued together. I also got the pumps running water through the systems on schedule. I expected to have a few leaks, but got a lot of them. Not from any of the PVC tubing or fill and drain fittings, but from the seams between the sides and bottom of the grow beds. I took pictures of the beds when I had water flowing through them all.

I drained and dried out all the grow beds. Then decided the best way to fix the leaks was to just pill out all the silicone seams inside the grow beds, and redo them. When I was constructing them, I noticed some of the silicone seams were starting to peal out (but was in too much of a hurry to fix it then). That's mainly why I expected some leaks, but thought the fact I had 3 layers of sealing, any leaks would be minimal. So now I'm needing to redo them. I have already pulled up all the inside silicone seams, and I'm in the process sealing it with marine goop (actually pluming goop). It will be more expensive than silicone, but the goop wont peal from the plastic. It's just a mater of getting a good bead of it in the seam. I have almost 1/2 of the grow beds resealed at the end of today. by the time I'm done I will have probably gone through about 20 tubes of goop. Luckily wal-mart carries the pluming goop for about $4 each, but I bought all they had on the shelf last Friday (11 of them). Hopefully they'll have restocked by tomorrow. Home depot (dopey) has it as well, but it cost about a dollar more ea.

As usual I have more pictures than can be posted in one post, so I'll make another post for the rest.
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