Help ! My first tank leak !

[mling]

Guess I have been lucky since this is my first tank (glass) leak in over 20 years !
Problem is I have no clue what to do. It is a slow leak at one of the seams of my 50 Gal FOWLR, like a tear drop every 3 seconds. It is about 6" from the bottom of the tank. Discovered it late last night when we returned home from a weekend trip. Lucky for us, it must have started just a few hrs before we got home since that was not much water damage.

What I have done to stop to leak is to reduce the water pressure at the leak point by taking out about 60% of the water. I've applied some glue on the leak spot ( the Hot Gun plastic stuff used for arts and crafts, only thing I had at 11:30pm ). Obviously this is a temporary fix.

What do you do with such a leak ? I guess some kind of silicon glue to have to be used. Is there one brand that is better than others ? Can I just drop by home depot to get a Silicon based calk ?

Do you have to glue both the inside and outside of the tank ?

Thanks in advance for any advise.

 

[warloc4326]

Leaks can be extremely difficult to work with and in the long run it may be cheaper to purchase a new tank. In any case. If it is a seam leak you probably have a bad seam overall. My suggestion would be to remove all seams inside of the tank, clean the seam areas extremely well and apply a bead of silicon to the entire inside of the tank again making sure to tool the silicon bead down into the joint. I've seen a few tanks where people tried to replace just 1 seam and ended up having the entire wall pull apart on them But this is just from my personal experience getting a phone call at 11:30 at night because someone's back wall of their 120g tank slowly let loose.

 

[mling]

This tank is old, 13 years old. Yes, I know it has probably out lived it's usefullness. However, I am planing to move in the next 6 months. That is when I plan to upgrade the tank to a 100G +.
I have heard horror stories of tank moves and won't want to do it if I don't have to.

I am also toying with the idea of combining the FOWLR and Reef in to a real biggie with LR seperating the fish that won't get along.

So looks like I will start patching the outside of this tank and hope to will hold till I move.