Thursday, March 31, 2016

Holes in Things

So, someone keeps biting holes in my veg oil containers.  the dog? raccoons? 

It's not like it's just sitting around. I have it up on a tower...

And then I discovered that this PVC pipe just unglued itself.   I suspect that there was some amount of tension on the pipe further down the hill, and for whatever reason, it just came undone.   The sad part is that it means we lost 5000 gallons of stored rainwater when it failed. Bummer.  It will probably not rain another 4 inches yet this year to replace that.   
I've easily let another 10,000 gallons go off into the woods because these tanks were full early in the season.  It'd have been nice if this pipe had failed earlier in the rainy season, if it was going to fail. 

3 comments:

Doug Diboll said...

The veg oil container looks more like bird's beak piercings as birds tend to need more fat in winter. Any rodent would have gnawed through that thickness of HDPE in minutes to get to it's nectar!

Doug Diboll said...

Is there any way to analyse the PVC joint for future reference? Were both surfaces cleaned of burrs well enough, was enough primer and sealant applied, etc.?

Tys said...

hey Doug, sorry I didn't see this earlier. I looked all over that PVC joint, and couldn't really see anything I did wrong. at most, I might not have covered both sides with enough glue... I do think it was just downward pressure from the hillside pulling on the pipe, and thus the joint.

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