$5 and 5 Minutes: Fix a Running Toilet
- by Chris Jordan on Jul 7th 2009 1:00PM
- fix-it, bathroom, plumbing
Do you have a toilet that won't stop running? Do you constantly have to jiggle the handle, or remind other people to do so? That constant running water is adding up to big bucks on your water bill, not to mention the many gallons or water that are being wasted. You would never let your sink run all day and night, most of us even turn off the water while we are brushing our teeth, so why let the toilet continually waste water?
A running toilet can waste two gallons of water per minute, while a silent leak in a toilet can waste up to 7,000 gallons of water per month.
If you are not sure if your toilet is running, turn off the tap behind your toilet. Check the water level in the tank. Leave it for a few hours and then recheck the tank. If the water level has dropped, you have a problem.
There are only so many things that can go wrong inside of your toilet. Fixing your toilet is inexpensive and easy. So easy, in fact, that it doesn't even require tools!


We've all been there: that rising feeling of dread and suspense. No, I'm not talking about one of Jean-Paul Sartre's books. I'm talking about when we flush the toilet and all of a sudden the bowl's contents slowly start moving in completely the wrong direction. What to do?
Yesterday we talked about
One of our four cats seems to love to play with the
Is it difficult to find enthusiasm about cleaning the
If you've got an older toilet in your house (not the
There's an absolutely marvelous plumbing hack on the Instructables site which is worthy of your time. The blogger gives us a very understandable synopsis of how to pre-use the water which refills your toilet tank after flushing.
Somewhere along the way, all our fathers became the same. Anyone who laughs at Chevy Case in National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, John Candy in The Great Outdoors, or Darren McGavin in A Christmas Story recognizes those iconic fathers as representations of our own. Each one of our fathers is determined to fix things himself, come hell or high water, and when I started Do-It-Yourself stuff around my own home, I had visions of my own "Old Man" tinkering with things around the house to "improve" them. However, when he came to visit a few weeks ago, I was reminded how I learned the value of home-improvement from my Dad. A lesson that is not easily forgotten.






