After dealing with 3 pumps failing on my 2 Gardyn units, I asked my handyman and he came up with a nice solution which I will describe below.

First pump failure happened after 10 months of using the Gardyn unit. Reason: corrosion of the electrical wires due to nutrients in the water, even though the water is not reaching the wires. The wires are under dimension to resist the nutrient corrosion. With the help of customer service and 2 weeks of watering my unit manually. I put in the replacement sent by Gardyn and sent the broken pump back to them. The replacement failed again 3 months later. This time one of the pins in the electrical connection came off and broke the electrical contact. No power no pump!

Second pump failure on my other unit happened after 14 months of use, same way. Of course, it was not in the one year warranty period any longer but fortunately when my first failure happened I ordered a new pump to be prepared. I put the new pump in and it did not work. Ok, by now I knew I don’t want to deal with this issue again and again every few months. Changing the pump is not the most enjoyable thing to do when you are very busy anyway.

So, my handyman came up with an idea. Cut off the original connectors, mount a Bullet male and female 0.5-1.5 mm² AWG 22-16 on each wire, opposite on the pump side comparing with the lid side male/female and female/male. This is to make sure that red leads on the pump mate with red leads on the power connector (lid side of the connector) and black with black leads on the power connector (see picture below).  So that’s what we did and the “broken” pumps are now working amazingly well! No weeks of waiting and manual watering.

I know that it may feel overwhelming to install these new connectors, especially after dealing with the failure. It took my husband about 20 min for a pump and he is not an electrician.