Fixing a Running Toilet in a Quick Way

All right, we all recognize this room. We all know what goes on in here and I’m not talking about showers, I’m talking about this porcelain beauty known as a crapper or a toilet or whatever you want to call it. I'm sure you all hear that sound behind me right now. That’s a sound of running water; kind of makes me have to pee. But what that does mean is this is a running toilet. So, if you have a running toilet, better go catch it. No, I'm kidding. That’s a terrible joke. I would never really say that.

The point is, is that your wasting a lot of water. So, I'm going to show you how to fix that, how to stop that. A couple of reasons why your toilet would be running, either it’s a bad valve or the little flapper. It sometimes corrode and then it doesn’t seal and then the water just keeps leaking in and it has to keep refilling over and over again. Either way, it’s not good.

First thing you want to do is you want to come down here to the valve and you're going to have to come around and see. You guys got to see it too. I just want to shut it off. Just crank it down. Okay, now we turned off the valve down there, no more running water which is good. But we have to go in here and basically, fix this valve because if you look at it, you got this valve here. This is the whole mechanism. It’s called a ball cock. I don’t name it. I just tell you what its called, so don’t write me.

First thing I'm going to do here is flush the toilet. And really, it’s a pretty simple fix. You don’t have to replace this whole thing. I mean you look in here. There’s a lot of stuff in here but you don’t have to replace it all, just this top valve. So easy, you push down and kind of hold it, click, off, nice, so that’s the piece. This is the piece it wasn’t working—here. That’s what allows the water to go on and off. Now look at that, trust the toolbox. It just happens to have another one here. So, you're going to make sure there are definitely a few different types, Fluidmaster, perfect. I love it when that works out like that.

So, pick it up. I mean this could not be easier. And what are you going do? You're going to call somebody to come do this? How much does it cost for a service call? $50.00? $75.00? You're going to call a plumber to come out to replace this? Then he’s going to charge you for the part two, probably double charge it. No! So, you just put this on here, just turn it and snap it. It’s tight.

Okay, a little water saving tip. I’ll tell you what's easier. I’ll just show you with this one. This is the same thing. This is the aforementioned ball cock. It’s really just fun to say. As you can see, water fills up, lift the little floaty, lifts the lever, the water stops. Now, if you want to save some water and not have much water going to the tank, go green as we love to say. You can slide this thing down. This one happens to be a little meddle pinchy deal. You just kind of pinch it. Slide it like this all the way down to there.

Now, less water, the water fills up. As you can see, it’s already lift the lever up here and shuts it off. So, you save, I don’t know, a couple of gallons every flush. I mean it adds up. We waste a lot of water, so that’s a good way to go green. All right, back to the task in hand. In theory, we just turn on the water, the thing starts filling up and you can save some water. So, here we go. This is the exciting part. So, this is to check to make sure we turned this on right or put this on right. I checked the lever. Just lift that, a piece of cake. You don’t have to lift it hard. It shuts off the water and that’s how this whole thing works and we [Inaudible] over that. You put it down, it will keep filling up.

Here's an emergency thing, hang on. I need a wire hanger. I know where I want this, hold on. So, you’re getting ready for dinner party. You're ready to go out and your toilet cracks. Plumbing disaster, it’s Saturday night, you’ve got 8:30 dinner reservations. You're too late. You're going to be able to make it. What are you going to do? You can't call a plumber and you can't have this thing running all the time. So, what you do is you take your handy dandy lineman pliers and we just go snip, snip. We just kind of take this and we’ll run it under and when it’s done, it holds this lever up. It shuts off the water. That’s a quick fix. That’s where, “Okay, honey we’ll do all these later.” You know, call the plumber on Monday, but for now, you’re good to go. Just don’t forget about it, have a couple of drinks and then come home and he use the toilet and then try to flush it. That would be bad. So anyway, that’s a little quick fix. Our work is done here. Well, most of it is.