Tropical Fish Forum
Tropical Fish Keeping Help and Advice => The Emergency Room => Topic started by: LibertyEnglish on November 25, 2012, 11:52:07 PM
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Hello
I have a 115 litre tank, and over the last 3 or 4 days I have noticed a slight dampness on the table all around the base of the tank. Not puddles....just a tiny bit of moistness all the way around the perimetre. The glass is not wet, so the water must be coming out of the bottom somewhere, but I cant see anything. The tank has received no knocks, so i dont know why this is suddenly happening.
How seriously do you think I should be taking this? Is the tank about to lose its structural integrity and fall apart at the seams?? Has anyone had a similar problem? I'm a bit surprised that a tank can suddenly leak in this way for no apparant reason.
Many thanks
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Hi,
The first thing to check is that the water isn't leaking out from under your tank's lid. I had a tank that did just that.
Are you as messy as me and get water everywhere during a water change? If some gets under the tank it could then seep out over a few days.
I'm not sure how you could check the tank's seams. For the side seams, maybe make sure they're completely dry then fix a paper towel/tissue over them for a few hours. The bottom seams would be trickier though. Is the tank flat bottomed or does it have a floating base? (is the whole of the bottom in contact with the table or is there a rim under the tank). You could use paper towels round the bottom if it's a flat bottomed tank but that wouldn't work for a floating base. The only thing I can suggest there is that you'd have to empty the tank, take it outside (when it stops raining!), run a couple of inches of water in and see what happens. But that's not something that you want to do till you've eliminated everything else.
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Hi Sue
Thanks for the reply.
I dont think the water is leaking from under the lid because the tank is completely dry apart from around the base.
Yes....I AM a little messy during the water changes. Perhaps that is it......a gradual seepage of water that has managed to lodge itself under the tank. If that is the case then I will be greatfully relieved. It is a flat bottomed tank, all the base in contact with the table.
Hopefully it will just stop by itself within a few days if this is the case, but it is worrying me a little. There is definitely a part of me that is thinking I'll wake up one morning to find a lot of dead fish, water and broken fish tank on my living room floor!!
Emptying the tank would really have to be a last resort desperation measure. I think it would be extremely traumatic for the fish and I don't have a reserve tank....poor things would have to sit in buckets whilst the job was done.
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My 25 litre tanks are flat bottomed, and I do get water between the tank and base mat (and between the base mat and work top) every time I do a water change ;D
Being flat bottomed, it should be easier to check for a leak in the sealant round the base. If you can get it as dry as possible, then pack round the bottom with paper towels/tissues, they'd only get wet if there was more water either seeping out from a spillage or from a leak. It would stop seeping from a spillage eventually, but a leak would carry on.
I'm not 100% sure, but if it does turn out to be a leak, a sealant leak would get worse before imploding. It's a crack in the glass that would go very suddenly. Obviously, you can see the sides and check for damage to the glass. Would it be possible to expose the bottom pane in sections to check for a crack?
With the tank being flat bottomed, do you have anything between it and the table? If the tank just sits on the table with nothing between, there is a potential for the bottom to crack. Any imperfection in the table or glass, or even a grain of sand caught between them can cause the bottom to crack. My betta's tank and the quarantine tank both have foam basemats under them, and before I bought them they had polystyrene tiles under them (they started to deteriorate which is why I got the foam)
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Hi Liberty, (great username by the way :) )
Just another thought - do you have an external filter? If so, check the pipes and plastic joins etc. I found water coming from under my tank and it turned out to be the plastic elbow connection into the tank had cracked. Water had been slowly dripping down the back of the tank and seeped underneath until there was enough to seep out the front/side. I was relieved to find it was just a cracked pipe - I hope you find yours is something easily remedied too.
Good luck and keep us posted ;)
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Hi Liberty, based on my experience of a tank cracking, I would be surprised if yours had cracked. Mine cracked across the bottom and it was very sudden. The water poured out from between the tank and the cabinet and I could visibly see the water level dropping.
The only difference is that my tank had a floating bottom. But I would still be surprised if a slow leak was due to a crack. By slow, I mean more than one day. Although my tank had some additional help from me to remove the water, it emptied in less than an hour - and it is a 240l tank, so twice the size of yours.
How old is your tank? Although the seals on tanks are pretty impressive, I think they can eventually degrade over time. Though, I think this is more like decades. There are a few things that could speed up that degradation, for example if you've ever really cleaned the tank out with aggressive cleaning products (perhaps if you bought the tank second hand). I think I have also read that using some of the algae scrapers too close to the seals can eventually wear them away. But again I think this would take many years of use.
By the way, my tank cracked within days of completely filling it for the first time, with the heater on. I only had substrate and plants in it - no fish.
I hope you find the problem.
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PROBLEM SOLVED!
Well, I'm still not 100% certain how the water got in underneath the tank in the first place....presumably from a particularly messy water change, or maybe I slightly overfilled the tank on the last change and some water spilled out from the back.
Anyway, I put the paper towels around the bottom of the tank and pushed them right up against where the tank meets the table as tightly and neatly as I could. This had the effect of very quickly 'sucking' all the water from underneath in very little time, and then the replacement towels have remained completely dry so I know it has all gone.
Most importantly, as the water has not been replenished i know that it is not a leak...phew! Huge relief!
Many thanks for all your help and suggestions. :D
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Great news Liberty :) And thanks for letting us know!
Its a worry when something like that happens and you dont know the cause - the worse case scenario always goes through your mind and you pray like mad that its something simple ;D