It’s a funny thing. Virtually everyone knows how to use a toilet. It’s one of the first things we learn as children. Yet as soon as that toilet begins to malfunction, we’re lost.
One would think that as important as a toilet is in a home or business, Pittsburgh toilet repairs will be part of the curriculum at the local school district in this beautiful city.
They should make it a law that before anyone can graduate from high school that they are able to take apart a toilet and put it back together. They should also have basic knowledge of everything that can go wrong with one.
Why is it that they teach home economics? It centers around the kitchen, but you can get by if your refrigerator goes on the blink. You can order takeout from local restaurants. Just try living in a home that doesn’t have a functioning toilet, though.
Why are DIY Toilet Repairs Inside the Tank So Important to Master?
Because that’s where the moving parts are.
While you were going about your life, important new developments were being made towards creating the modern toilet. Pretty much all of them were being made inside the tank too.
The reason for this is elemental. The bowl of the toilet is, after all, the shape of a bowl. That shape can be traced back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization.
There’s nothing to improve on. The toilet tank, though, has been crying out for improvement since the advent of indoor plumbing. There’s plenty of room for change back there, and it has changed.
The electric toilet tank has yet to be developed, but you can sure bet that somewhere someone is working on that. So it’s still all mechanical in its function, but there are weak areas that still cause problems today.
Most notably is the rubber flipper that’s located at the bottom of the tank. It’s rubber and water, and that’s a bad mix because the water corrodes the rubber over time, leading to that steady drip.
Toilet Dripping Water Sound is Easy to Stop
It’s coming from the tank.
Water contained in a tank for years and years and expecting nothing to happen is a bit of a stretch. Water always wants out, and over time it will eventually get its way.
So one of the most common problems that a toilet can have is water dripping from the tank down into the bowl. There are also two avenues it will take to do this.
The first one is noted above. A tiny rubber flipper at the bottom of the tank will decay over time, leaving small cracks in the rubber where the water gradually seeps through.
Then the second source for dripping water coming from a toilet tank is the volume float that’s been adjusted too high. Round ball floats are still available. They’re being phased out, though, by a new modern type of float that rides up and down on a shaft.
It’s usually black, and it has a small screw on the top to adjust it to sit higher or lower. If it sits too high, the tank will overfill, and the excess water will spill out the overflow drainpipe.
When Your Toilet Clogs Easily, Then This is Causing the Problem
It’s a common problem, and the solution may or may not come easy.
If a toilet clogs easily, you have a problem that’s not going to go away on its own. This is because there’s something stuck down inside of it that needs to come out.
A child has flushed a toy down the toilet. Or something like a toothbrush or a pencil is lodged down inside it. Either way, whatever it is, is jammed up in the loop down inside your toilet.
Take a look at your toilet bowl from the side, and you will see the route that the water takes when it’s flushed. It doesn’t go straight down. Instead, the water loops around. The reasoning for it is that the bowl will stay filled with water.
So you can try to get it out with a wire coat hanger, and if that doesn’t work, the toilet will have to be unscrewed and pulled up from the floor.
There’s just no way around this because whatever it is that’s stuck down there can only be reached from the underside.
Is your toilet wobbly?
The problem is that it has come loose from the floor.
To solve this problem, Kwiatkowski Plumbing was contacted at 412-681-9525 because there’s more than one remedy, and we wanted to know which one works best.
This is a problem that needs to be fixed because it’s only going to get worse. It can also lead to floor damage unless it’s sitting on a cement floor.
So they told us that the first thing to try is to use some thin plastic shims crammed underneath it to stop it from rocking back and forth or from side to side.
Thin plastic shims are available at your local hardware store. They’re referred to as door shims. You’ll find them where products related to door installation are located.
Lean the toilet to one side and then fill the gap on the other by shoving plastic shims underneath it. If this stops it from rocking, then remove the shims and cut them off to the length that’s needed.
Do this, so you don’t have long shins poking out from underneath the toilet. If that doesn’t do the trick, then it may be that the bolts on either side of it that hold it down have become corroded.
They may have come loose from where they are mounted underneath the toilet.
In this case, the toilet has to be drained completely, unbolted a removed from the floor. After it’s been removed, you can retrieve the obstruction. Then, the final step is to remount it with a new wax seal and new hardware holding it down.