I think that maybe you are all going overboard a little. It's almost as if you are bolting another four engines, an extra set of wings and sticking a few more pilots in a Jumbo Jet just in case some parts fail. Trouble with that is you get to a point where its so overly complex you miss something simple, so the plane still crashes
.
I'll have to do an air pressure test with my clipless pipes but I can assure you they will not pop off, slip off, or leak, Just think about it with the barb in a vice using all my strength and body weight all I can do is stretch the tube a bit. I used to have the whole system with barbs done in a similar fashion, and none ever leaked or came off. I much prefer the festo push fittings now because I can make smaller neater blocks and connect and disconnect them quickly & easily without worry of leaks. The tube isn't an issue once you have some of the correct stuff, I think it was about £15 for 20 meters of the 8mm
The liquid level sensor as said I haven't done yet but I'll be using a sealed optical type liquid sensor I have here atm.
Part of the reason for soldering my blocks is with the more complex shapes of the VGA ram blocks and Splitter-X in my system, it would be very difficult to make a seal grove without access to CNC, and like you say the blocks can be thinner walled and smaller overall if soldered.
It doesn't really matter what target you set yourself but I think you have to be realistic when using water cooling and that's why I say "major disaster every two years". I would probably double that to every four years if I just built the system and then didn't dick around with it at all, but as I'm constantly modding it and upgrading parts of it adding new blocks etc, the possibility of a screw up on my part is much higher. It wont change the world but if you beat your target you'll get a nice warm feeling about it too.
