Somewhere in the middle of the build, a cable outage took the whole system down. That was the moment it stopped being a fun project and started being something I had to take seriously, because a few hours without power meant real plant losses.
The fix was a rebuild of the setup around one pump per tower instead of a shared system, plus a UPS to ride out any outage. We tested it properly before an 18-day trip away from home, no hands on the system at all. It held. Every plant survived, heaviest fruiting I’d seen yet when we got back.
Later in the season a pump failed on one of the towers anyway, quietly, days before anyone noticed. Some plants didn’t make it. It was a reminder that hardening a system once doesn’t mean it’s hardened forever, every point of failure needs checking on, not just fixing once.
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