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off-grid fittings
Tuesday, September 6 2005
After a housecall in Mount Tremper I got a collection of "off-grid" 3/4 inch copper fittings from the bigger of the two Woodstock hardware stores. By "off-grid," I don't mean "not connected to utilities," I mean fittings that, when fitted together, allow one to violate the grid limits of standard straight and 90 degree fittings. These grid limits are very useful for the spacing of details on a copper pipe menorah or a swing lamp, but they make it impossible to bend a pipe to a position outside of the grid; it's like trying to put an icon in a half-way position on your Windows desktop when you have the idiotic "align to grid" option enabled. However, as just implied, there are fittings that allow you to violate the grid. One such fitting is the 45 degree fitting, and other grid-violating fittings are the "street" fittings, the ones that are flared on one end but not the other, allowing them to be attached to one another without intervening lengths of cut pipe. There are three such off-grid fittings, and I was sure to get all of them, and an extra of the ever-useful 90 degree street elbow.
Armed with these new fittings, I was able to make a neat job of connecting the indoor part of my solar plumbing to the sillcocks on the north wall of the house (they're just to the west of the laboratory deck, though — in a mild manifestation of not-completely-intelligent-design — they are so close to one another that it's difficult to work one without disturbing the other).
After getting all that plumbing in place, I was ready to give my system its first pressurized pump test. I connected a short length of washing machine hose between the two outdoor hosecocks and then hotwired the circulator pump, a Grundfos UPS15-58 FC. It made all the right noises initially but didn't seem to be circulating any water, so then I tried shifting it to a higher speed (it had been on low). At that point it just seemed to hang. Nothing could be done to make it go. Hours later I tried it again and it worked, but always seemed to be a crapshoot whether or not it would work when it was energized. What a piece of junk! Compounding my problems, I'd lost the instruction sheet that had come with it, and the Grundfos website proved gratuitously unhelpful.
After hours of frustrating tests and what not, I decided to install a drain and cutoff valve on the line leaving the circulator pump. Air bubbles seemed to be blocking the system, and I was going to need more ways to get water and air out it.
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