Urgent help needed Leak - arghhh

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Got up this morning and the temp in the main tank was 21C

So i had a look and the return chamber of the sump was almost empty, thus no warm water going to the top, oh and the damn floor was wet. So i think the sump has a leak as i couldn't see anything wet except on the floor at the sump, so possibly a crack in the base of it?

Best way to go about fixing it?
 
You will first have to find the leak before we can advise on how to fix it. Also make sure the leak is not on the connectors from the return to the tank
 
Well ive drained the sump and dried everything off. No leak from the main tank it seems, and also not from the plumbing to the sump, so im guessing the base of the sump but still need to find a leak. Visual inspection revealed nothing. How to find the leak?
 
Got up this morning and the temp in the main tank was 21C

So i had a look and the return chamber of the sump was almost empty, thus no warm water going to the top, oh and the damn floor was wet. So i think the sump has a leak as i couldn't see anything wet except on the floor at the sump, so possibly a crack in the base of it?

Best way to go about fixing it?

A crack will be visible ... What thickness is the sump floor ?
What is under the sump .... supporting it .... polystyrene / wood
What are the chances of the joins on the glass between wall and floor leaking?

You will first have to find the leak before we can advise on how to fix it. Also make sure the leak is not on the connectors from the return to the tank
You have to find the leak and the cause as Pete said
 
Well ive drained the sump and dried everything off. No leak from the main tank it seems, and also not from the plumbing to the sump, so im guessing the base of the sump but still need to find a leak. Visual inspection revealed nothing. How to find the leak?

Well your best bet is to place the sump on something like dry newspaper so you look at newspaper and easily identify which area the sump is leaking from ...
 
Poly at the bottom. The sump is cleaned and still no visible crack or sign of the leak. I will try the newspaper bit, argh if some1 has a sump lemme know plz
 
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Ok the sump is dried and on a piece of newspaper, which is nice and level, filled to normal running level, lets see if that shows up anything.

If the main tank overflowed i think the polystyrene on the bottom om the main tank would have been wet. Everything was bone dry except for the bottom of the sump where the polystyrene is
 
Ok so the newspaper is dry as a bone, so its not the sump wtf

The main tank is running, but with no overflow obviously, also put newspaper on the floor to see if it shows any drops or anything but nothing i can see

Seriously confused :wtf:
 
The snail moved on...
Now the hole is open...

Did your power go out during the night? And your syphon break did not break, like in it is broken?

That could explain why sump is wet and everthing now looks OK.
 
Well the PC was still on this morning, so there was no power outage and i do have a syphon break at the top of the tank where the return pump dumps into the main tank...

The mystery continues, still no leaks from sump or main tank
 
Do you have an internal or external skimmer? If external it could be that something happened in the tank and it started to overskim, filling the cup and overflowing.
 
Internal Tunze skimmer, the cup was fairly empty - so not that. This is actually killing me, i rinsed the dsb sand and want to put everything back in the sump to reconnect it all, but still have no clue where the water on the floor came from. The sump's return chamber was empty so it's quite a lot of water but there clearly is no leak it seems
 
What about the return pipe popping of the return pump ..... Then the pump throwing whatever water was in the chamber onto the floor?
 
Maybe put some tank water in a bucket and put the return pump on. Check for leaks. You wouldn't have seen anything since the return chamber was empty.


Good idea, check back in 20min or so :p

I hope they dont miss me at work today!
 
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