Pentair UV Housing Cracked

[RedG]

Hello and happy Father's day to all dads. Today, I woke up and leave the house with my son to start our Father's Day plans, 30 mins later I get the call that all reefers fear, the tank is leaking come home now. They FaceTime me, and I see the UV housing is leaking by a small crack that kept getting bigger by the minutes. On the Apex I immediately shut off the pump to it, and have them close valve.

We come home and see the crack, and was baffled to see the equipment failure. The plastic housing completely degraded, the plastic supper thin and soft at one end, but hard at the other.

Is this normal? The bulb and bulb housing inside are intact, we replace the bulb usually once a year, but I have never checked the integrity of the housing to see if it was soft.

I'm still puzzle why the material degraded like that, this was installed when we got into the hobby back in mid 2021. So it lasted 5 years.

I thought this was one of the better choices available for UV in the hobby, but seeing this happened now makes me wonder.
I will contact Pentair about it, but obviously now need a replacement.

Is there a better choice? Anything we could have done better?

 

[RedG]

 

[BoredNuke]

Nightmare scenario for sure and not unheard which made me hesistant for awhile to get uv. Not sure with the pentair models but the lifeguard sterilizer have a inner white sleeve that needs to be replaced yearly that is supposed to catch the uv's as they are very hard on plastics. If its just straight UV on black ABS i would be surprised it lasted 5 years.

 

[Lasse]

All plastics will be broken down by UV-C with time - its not a question if it will broke down - only when it will be broken. Either prepare to change the equipment every second or third year or get a titan housing

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Privateye]

Definitely bring it to Pentair's attention. They can potentially offer the most assistance.

The important thing to prevent this is that the unit must be full of water. It looks like yours is installed vertically, which means water would need to enter through the bottom and exit through the top port. That will allow the unit to evacuate air. If the water moved in the opposite direction then that is a likely cause, or at least one that can't be ruled-out.

Is it normal? Technically no, but there's a more-accurate answer. When units are installed and operated properly this is not common. However, in some cases it can still occur. You never see this issue with their high output models (which have a wider body, meaning more water to protect the housing from the light). You also don't really hear about it with the 18W and 25W models. The 40W though....there are definitely cases where it does happen, even with proper installation. The early warning sign is if you can see light through the vessel itself when the room is dark.

I forget the numbers, but the vast majority of the 40W units sold do not exhibit this problem. A small portion of them do, but because it's probably the most-popular model for aquariums these stories come up. There are just a lot of 40W units out there. As I recall this can also happen sometimes with the 65W units, but they're not very popular (they're really long for the output) so you don't see people posting about them much online.

For the first 5 years that Pentair offered these units the vessels had lifetime warranties. They bought the original manufacturer (Emperor Aquatics) which had offered the same warranty. However, eventually those warranty claims from Emperor's sales became unsustainable, and changes had to be made. One change is they completely got rid of the "Lite" models, which had 2" PVC housings, and were downright prone to this issue. Another is they changed the lifetime vessel warranty to 3 years. I want to say that was in 2018. So I don't want to get your hopes up about a free replacement unfortunately, but every part is replaceable and they can definitely sell you a new vessel. I can't speak for them though. Perhaps things will go differently.

Alternatively, if you wanted to upgrade to a high-output model, they may be willing to work with you a bit on the price given your experience. If you're interested in upgrading there's no harm in exploring that option.

I'm sorry this happened to you. It's never a good story.