Primochill Advanced CRT reservoir TO AVOID rant

kcchi · January 1, 2014

Finished my build over a week ago but I've only used it for a few hours total to be honest because of my reservoir

It slightly leaked from the top and bottom, one drop at a time, didn't care at first but decided to drain and see what was wrong

After removing their compression caps, I found out exactly how the mechanism worked and it wasn't the best by far: a single O-ring INSIDE the tube, held in place with nothing but the pressure applied by the inner cap from the outer cap which i see how it could have easily led to a small leak.

My problem was exactly this: the O-ring wasn't perfect, and if you're going to put one INSIDE a reservoir instead of outside, it really has to be perfect. That wasn't all however.

Decided to put everything back together, hoping I was wrong and that by doing so, it would at least help with minimizing the leaks but upon screwing back the caps on, cracks appeared. They did mention that it was possible for cracks to form when over-tightening the end caps, which is why i made sure not to, and slowly, in cross patterns, tightened the caps. Still got 2 small cracks, but I couldn't feel the actual physical damage so I still tried a leak test. No water came out of the cracks but it still leaked from the end caps which I firmly believe is because of the poor mechanism.

I then tried many things to avoid having to buy another reservoir since Primochill's apparently "is not responsible for any hardware damage" (taken from their website) and I understand since people can be really careless at times but I believe I wasn't and leaks and cracks still formed.

To be completely neutral, i might not have been 110% perfect when re-installing the caps, which, trust me, isn't all that easy to do perfectly, and might have made things slightly worse. However, the facts remain that there was already a problem at the very beginning and that their mechanism isn't the best of all. I might also have gotten a slightly defective product, who knows. I did use Primochill's rigid tubing as well as Liquid Utopia additive in this exact same build and had no problem whatsoever, no leaks at all. Maybe because they actually have the O-ring on the OUTSIDE this time around.

Anyways, this has been a long rant about my experience and I believe it is my duty to share it with all of you to prevent any more people from a bad and frustrating experience. Luckily for me, no components have been damaged and, after a few days of coming up with different ideas to make things better, I just placed an order for another reservoir

Hope this has helped a few in their decisions and Happy New Year.