My uncle said to use duct tape on a cracked toilet tank as a temporary fix

He told me last Saturday that a strip of gorilla tape would hold for a few days until I could get to Lowes, but 8 hours later I woke up to water leaking through the ceiling into the kitchen and had to tear out the whole bathroom floor, so has anyone else had a duct tape fix completely backfire like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

logan_mitchell1mo agoTop Commenter

Watched my buddy try the same thing on a RV water tank once. Thing held for about three days then burst right in the middle of the night, flooded the whole camper and ruined his mattress.

emmam895d ago

Hold up though, @logan_mitchell, I've gotta push back here. That sounds more like a bad patch job than proof the idea doesn't work. If you don't sand the plastic enough or use the WRONG kind of epoxy, yeah, it's gonna fail fast. But if you actually take the time to clean the seam with acetone and use a plastic welder instead of glue, those repairs can be ROCK solid. I've seen guys fix cracked kayaks with plastic welding and they hold up for YEARS under way more stress than an RV tank. A three day burst is just a sign your buddy rushed it or grabbed the wrong product.

samflores1mo ago

Yeah but I bet your buddy didn't prep the seam right or used the wrong kind of patch. A proper weld should hold way longer than three days, sounds like user error to me.

pat7811mo ago

Prepped mine with a wire brush and used the heavy duty patch kit from the hardware store, not the cheap auto parts store stuff. Let the sealant dry a full 24 hours before I even thought about putting water back in the tank. That combo held up for a whole summer season and only started leaking again when the tank itself cracked.