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Everything seemed fine with heat moving back to the fan. As a safeguard, where the copper meets the PVC assembly they never actually touch. The copper connector is held into the PVC with high temp silicone and has about 1/8" of just silicone. The thought was that this would act as a further thermal barrier. If the fan starts to droop off I will know there is a problem :)

There is also a silicone trivet under the vessel to isolate/insulate it from the main frame. It also acted as quite a nice sound dampener as well!