Any disasters with tanks leaking (or exploding!)?

[Roland]

About about a week ago I decided to set up my spare 40g tank, to breed jewel cichlids. It was the first time I had set it up since I moved house and it was transported down here by a removal company... maybe getting knocked about a bit? You bet it must have.

Well I filled it early evening, got the filter on and the heater heating and eventually went to bed. As I was drifting off to sleep I became aware of the sound of running water. I usally run an external filter for this tank, which sometimes does makes a noise like leaking water, and thought nothing of it for a few minutes.

Then I suddenly remembered (sitting bolt upright in the pitch dark) that I was running it with a box filter and knew immediatly I had BIG problems.

About half way down the tank the sealant had failed, and was peeing (sorry, best description) water all over my floor. At this point I really did think the whole thing was going to explode, as the water was more and more rapidly coming out of the hole.

Luckily it was only a few gallons that made it out before I could empty it, but it shows the potential for disaster ( and promotes the regular checking of tank structural integrity!). If it had emptied, I make that 360 pints of warm water for my house to some how deal with. I shudder to think...

Has anybody else had any near disasters/ disasters like this?
:eek:

[FireZeus]

Our 55 gl tank was moved with too much weight in it and lost the bottom seal. About 50 gallons had been lost at this time. We had just moved into this house not knowing much about it. When I pulled up the carpet to help it air out and not mold, we noticed that there was original oak hardwood flooring underneath. Great find in the hardwood, but now a major retoration of the house has begun since the whole house was done this way.

[Roland]

What an excellent discovery! Alls well that ends well...

[wetmanNY]

Every time I have even a small spill, I think: "Oh god what if that were salt water!"

I had one failure, after I had siliconed an endwall glass entirely covering one that had a mere hairline nick in it. Christmas Day, two years ago. That trickle trickle trickle in the dawn hours. ho ho ho indeed Santa...

Hard to think about even now. The buckets. Saving the top layer of the gravel. The fish.

I've blocked it...

[Tim Bo]

I still have nightmares about it sometimes. I was at my parents house watching their dog when my brother calls me up. "It sounds like someone is taking a shower in the living-room." I knew exactly what that meant...the 65 gallon had sprung a leak through the seams. All I could do was tell him to take out the fish and spread them around in the other tanks, and then suck out as much water as possible before it all leaked onto the floor. All in all. only about 1/4 th of the water leaked out but I still shudder to this day thinking about what the place would have looked like if nobody was there when it happened...

[Botch]

I've had two disasters with the same tank.
It is as 4ft 66gallon tank I got as a kid more than 20 years ago. When I went off to study and do military service, the tank stood empty, but when I started working some 13 years ago, I moved back in with my parents and set the tank up again.
One night my mother woke me up - the tank's bottom glass had cracked and all the water ran out in a matter of minutes. I lost the swordtails I used to cycle the tank with.
The tank stood empty for some years again. After I got married and became a father, I set that tank up again - after all, it's good for a child to grow up with an aquarium in the house :D .
I repaired that tank by siliconing a new bottom glass over the cracked one and resealing the base and everything worked well - for a while.
A year later one of the seams on the side split at night and I quickly had to move all the fish and plants to some of my other tanks. Luckily I did'nt lose anything this time.
When I mentioned repairing the 'big tank' again, my wife refused and bought me a brand new, identical 48x18x18 tank.
The old tank is outside, serving as a compost container. One of the side glasses broke in the meanwhile, but i'm sure if I have another one cut and replace all the old silicone... :D

[pinballqueen]

There used to be a 75 gallon custom tank in my parent's house. Once day my stepsister and I got into a fight and one of us (Not sure which one, really) bumped into the corner of the tank. About a week later, there was this odd dripping noise.... and then the bottom exploded! What a disaster. We didn't lose any fish, thank God, because I had a spare 29 gallon to move everyone into while we repaired the tank. We replaced the bottom with 1-inch-thick Lexan. No more glass-bottom customs for me....

[chaynes]

I've had two tanks leak. The first was a 10g perfecto that I had setup above my monitor so I could watch it from my computer. Well it failed one day when I was gone and ruined my $300 monitor. I know, I know I should have never put it there. But it was in the perfect place for viewing while working on the computer. The second tank that failed was the replacement tank that the store gave me for the first that failed. This time I was home and managed to save everything in it since I had an empty 55g just waiting to be filled up. Had it setup as a nano reef and it was completely full of expensive stuff. No more perfecto tanks for me.

[zmaj101]

All I can fit in my tiny apartment is a 20g, but any amount of water leaking through the floor into the apartment below is a disaster. I woke up one morning to discover that somehow the ammonia part of my AquaClear power filter had come loose and floated up just perfect to block most of the spillway back into the tank. Having nowhere to go, the water just overflowed out of the filter onto the floor. When I found it, the filter had pumped about 1/4 of the tank out onto the floor. I fixed the problem, set up a fan to dry the carpet, and left for work. For the rest of the week I could hardly sleep waiting for my landlord to come knocking on the door saying that the ceiling below me was leaking and I was paying for repair costs. He never came!

[shauna]

ok, these stories are freaking me out. are there ways to check your tank's seams while they are full and stocked?
i've got a 60 gallon tank that's quite old but never any problems with leaks or such.
ive got a stereo and ps2 that sits underneath it though. not too smart if something ever did happen.

[Rocketman]

I just had one. This is my first tank run on canisters, so I decided to clean it out this afternoon. Now, I consider myself extremely competent in mechanics, you know. That's why I wanted to kill someone after this episode.

So, I'm cleaning out the canister. I unplug the canister filter's plug, and, still wondering how to unplug the hoses without spilling water over all hell, I figure these little instructions would tell me if it did, and they don't mention it, so I dont bother getting my buckets. Anyway, I pull out the safety latch and pull out the adapter with the two hoses attached. I feel a red tab; I push that thing all the way back too. "Good thing I did that; that probably locks the thing." I pull it out, I hear water. "Aww, hell." I plug the two hoses back in, thinking thatthe hoses are just empty, (because there must be a remote stopper on the intake that I activated when I pulled the thing out? Don't ask what I was thinking.) So now the water is starting to push it's way out of the hose's - kinda like keeping a full pitcher of water over a running faucet. Now the water is coming through the canister itself. "This shouldn't happen. Hmm." I need a bucket. So, I leave the hoses on the floor, (in the tank stand, not realizing the flow,) and run down in the basement. Upon reaching the lower level, (right under my room with the tank in it,) I hear the sound of dripping water. As it hasn't rained here since about October, I said to myself, "That isn't what I think it is." Yup. I grabbed a bucket and bolted upstairs, and threw the two hoses in the thing.

I found the red tab I thought saved me; soon as I closed the bugger the water stopped. First thing I did, (being the mechanical man I am,) saw that I had lost about an inch of water; plugged that into the calculater and realized I lost about 2.5 Gallons.

Does that count?