With everyone’s movements severely limited over the last few months, many of us have used the time at home to work on some aquarium projects, including us. Since we couldn’t simply shop for parts at our LFS, naturally we decided to order the bulkheads we needed for a plumbing project online, and made the ill fated decision to save a few bucks while we were at it.
Normally, the standard issue plumbing parts for most plumbing projects in the hobbyist consumer aquarium market is Lifegard, usually good for up to projects requiring up to 2″ diameter PVC plumbing. Our cursory search yielded a pair of 1.5″ bulkheads for a meager $12.99 a pair, from a company called Encompass All selling ‘Aquarium Masters’ brand bulkheads.
This seemed like a decent deal considering that Lifegard version sell for about that price retail for a single one at the LFS, but is only a savings of a few bucks per bulkhead compared to other online prices. Little did I know that this thrifty purchase would end up costing me a lot of time, and plenty of leaked water.
Even in hindsight I can’t put my finger on it, the bulkheads seemed pretty standard when they arrived, but something about them just didn’t feel quite right. The texture of the plastic was a little different, the gasket is almost as hard as regular plastic, not rubber, but the most egregious part was how poorly the nut screwed around the bulkhead.
So what did I do? I went ahead and used them anyway, and it wasn’t until I had everything plumbed up that the error of my ways became clear. Immediately there was a leak from one of the bulkheads which wasn’t even under any pressure, just a couple inches of water. When I removed the external overflow box I was trying to plumb I realized that I couldn’t really tighten the nuts very hard until they slipped from their threads!
So again I tried to use these sh***y bulkheads by tightening them up as much as they would go, and replaced the external overflow box only to discover that now all the bulkheads were leaking even worse than before. By this point I’d wasted hours of trying to tighten and reseat these off-brand bulkheads and decided it was time to stop screwing around and go find some legit Lifegard bulkheads.
Big shout out to our LFS Aquamart for having many different Lifegard parts in stock, with plenty of the 1.5″ bulkheads I was looking for. Once we got back to our project with the proper, familiar, and trusted Lifegard bulkheads in hand, the plumbing proceeded without any further incident.
Contrary to what you might believe, this is not a sponsored post for Lifegard at all, just a reminder for DIY aquarists to use the parts and components that they can trust, and don’t try to save a few bucks or cut corners, especially on the bulkheads that are critical to keeping water in the aquarium system.
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