Just saying hello & hoping to meet other "strange" weirdo DIY people

[Dirk]

The plug is what has to give but also hold tightly.

The plugs I have do have some give to them, they're not hard plastic.

 

[godwinson]

further than that if you change your mind down the road.

I'm one of those people whose mind can ALWAYS be changed, since I'm a scientist and engineer at heart.

The good news is I don't trust my own intuition, where the bad news is most people trust their intuition too much (IMHO), since very few things are intuitive when you REALLY understand them, e.g., in this very thread alone, I was DEAD WRONG on what the fundamental parameters were for heating water, and also I was DEAD WRONG on what the fundamental parameters were on heat losses (both of which I very much APPRECIATE people setting me straight).

Being both a scientist and engineer, I'm no longer amazed at how bad we evolved monkeys are on intuition.
You can ALWAYS tell me I'm wrong - and I'll change my mind if you give me a good reason to as I do not trust my own intuition.

As just one example from the realm of general relativity, we humans naturally intuit that time is absolute, and yet we, as educated scientists, are well aware that spacetime is four dimensional. As evolved monkeys we intuit there is this sense of a "Force" of "Gravity", and yet, it doesn't even exist. We only intuit that gravity exists, because we evolved from monkeys who swung from tree to tree where the feeling of gravity is very real when we hit the ground. Monkeys don't think past their own intuition, and most people haven't evolved much further from that, unfortunately. They intuit that gravity is a "force", and yet, it's not. Worse, gravity doesn't even exist. At least not as we intuit it. The "force" doesn't exist. Einstein's field eqations teach us this. Gravity only exists in our mind because of our lousy monkey intuition - my point being that I know enough of engineering and sciences to know that my intuition is often wrong, and hence, since I'm a Myers-Briggs very strong "P" type personality, my mind is easily changed if someone gives me a good reason that makes sense.

Anyway, with regard to pool chemistry, the 40 pounds of Walmart cyanuric acid granules arrived yesterday and I'm currently dissolving the hard granules in buckets where I will successively re-fill and re-pour the resulting milk into the pool as it dissolves (since the equipment isn't running yet).

BTW, I would have preferred the powder - only because it dissolves more easily - and I did my homework when I checked up on whether it's an old wives tale that the powder causes irritation in the throat, and, while the safety data sheets say it can, they're really pretty rather mild on the warnings, which is unusual as I had expected more severe warnings on the powder (and I read MSDS information a lot to figure out what the "real" chemicals are).


To help others where I can, if anyone needs large amounts of CYA, the best prices I could find were around $2 per pound before shipping (and where shipping added about $45 which made it around $3 per pound taxed and shipped, but almost all those low-cost chemical supply houses either wouldn't sell to individuals or they didn't have any in stock).

Hence I was forced, after giving up on the bulk suppliers to use what normal people use, such as Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, Leslies, etc., where I settled on Walmart (which I see from reading the threads that many here also do the same).

Final price: $134.89/40 pounds + $12.48 tax + $0 shipping = $147.37 which comes to $3.68/pound
If you can beat that please do let me know as I pride myself on finding the best deals out there.
(plus, if you can beat that, others will also benefit - so please let me know if you find something better.)

From a sensible standpoint, I'd have preferred to get half that amount, but the price doubled so it cost about as much either way, and the good news on cyanuric acid is that it stores well, as opposed to, oh, say, common reagents such as OTO 0.13% orthololidine dihydrochloride hydrate (CAS 612-82-8), or 0.1% phenolsulfonphthalein (CAS#143-74-8).
--
SIDENOTE: We gain a huge amount of our "feeling" of gravity from the fact that everything moves at the speed of light through four dimensional spacetime - which took me a while to accept. There is only one speed for everything in the universe, whether it has mass or not, and that's what we call the speed of light. Light doesn't have mass so it moves AT the speed of light, but we have mass so we will never get to that speed through space, which means we have to use the rest of the speed to move through time (although it's all just one thing, spacetime). The reason we "think" we move at different speeds through space is because when we move more through space, we move less through time (and vice versa), my point being to underscore that nothing when you REALLY understand it... is intuitive.

 

[godwinson]

The plugs I have do have some give to them, they're not hard plastic.

I suspect I can find solid rubber "tube" (I can't think of a search term other than "solid rubber cord") like this.

I'll have to measure the diameter, but as a rough estimate, these 4mm rubber plugs are about a dollar a meter, taxed & shipped.

That means each plug would cost roughly about 3 cents (which is nothing), where you need two plugs per leak, so about ten cents (roughly) per leak (assuming 1 mistake per leak as the somewhat flexible plugs need to be cone shaped on a grinder and even the store-bought "correct" rubber plugs are actually difficult to shove far enough into the hard plastic tubes when it's wet (and it's always wet).

At that price, plugging up even a few hundred leaks isn't cost prohibitive (it's boringly labor intensive though).

If you've never done it (and you have, but others may not have), rest assured it takes a while until you get the precise technique down correctly to minimize the wiggle on the end with the small alignment hole that you're pushing until the pointy end of the rubber cone plug gets far enough into the plastic tube for the shoving end to stop wiggling (and for the pointer tool to not poke all the way through the rubber plug!).

On another note, the initial nine buckets of water, each with about a pound of cya granules are all dissolved into the pool now, and the pool water level is almost up to the skimmers, but I can only pump in about 300 to 600 gallons a day (at about 5 gallons a minute) which is just about all the well pump can handle before going dry for the day (it catches up overnight so this cycle has been going on for weeks to date).

With the CYA now at about 28 ppm, everything flips in terms of chemical calculus in that the 12.5% HASA sanitizer bleach will tremendously drop in effectiveness to a small percent of what it would have been at pH 7.5 (although my pH is always going to be a bit higher than most, currently at about pH 7.8 due to high well-water alkalinity of about 220 ppm).

However, the CYA tradeoff is such that the free chlorine level will be more consistent in light of the all-day sunlight (there's no shade whatsoever).

Better yet for my high-pH situation, the sanitizing activity will be tremendously less dependent on the pH within a wider pH range.

 

[Dirk]

Sorry, can't follow what you've figured out with the solar tubes repair. No matter. Here's another idea. I'm wondering if, instead of plugging the tube, and losing that tube's heat exchanging, what if you replaced the tube?

So you'd find some compatible tubing, and maybe 1/4" drip tubing could work (it's petty cheap, and it's black). You cut the existing leaking tube in two places, say 1" from each manifold, and slip in a length of 1/4" drip tubing to replace the cut out section. Then use 1/4" drip couplers, instead of plugs, to connect the new section to the 1" stubs. The couplers pass water, as will the 1/4" drip tube, so you'd still get that new tube's heat exchange. If a single tube has more than one leak, then replacing the tube would rid you of all its leaks in one shot. I've never actually heard of this MO, but it seems like it could work.

The unknown is the pressure. Can the tube and the coupler withstand the water pressure? Drip systems operate around 30psi. I have no idea what the PSI would be in a single solar panel tube. But maybe there's a way to calculate that. Or measure it. Or just try one and see what happens!

Not to scale, 1/4" barbed drip tubing coupler on the left, 1/4" drip tubing on the right. Quickie google search found 1000' of tubing for $65 (6.5¢/ft):

1/4" Polyethylene Micro Tubing

Connect your system easily and economically with the durable 1/4-inch polyethylene micro-tubing for drip irrigation available with fast shipping from DripWorks.

www.dripworks.com

 

[Dirk]

Come to think of it, forget the drip tubing. If you just sliced the leaking tube right across where the pinhole leak is, and used one 1/4" drip coupler to reconnect the severed halves, that could fix the leak while still allowing water flow through the tube. If the barbed couplers can hold against the pressure, then you only need one per leak, and you'd lose little or no heat exchange.

Here are 60 couplers for $8, and there are probably better deals out there. That's about 13¢ per leak, or about $26 to repair your panels (assuming about 200 leaks). And you wouldn't have to fabricate 200 plugs on your grinder if that's what you were describing in your post. Yikes, that'd be a lot of work.

https://www.amazon.com/PAGOW-Irrigation-Coupling-Connectors-Sprinkler/dp/B097MSP5N9/

I should point out that I'm just sort'a playing along. As I mentioned earlier, those panels are at end-of-life and any great effort or expense to repair them might be better spent on new panels. But I'm respecting your budget constraint and part of me wants to see if you can actually give them a second wind.