Toilet Repair, Again

How many times have I had to repair this toilet? Let me count the ways:

1. Flapper valve failed
2. Wet floor
3. Broken handle

This time it was a leak. On the supply side, fortunately. Re-tightened all the fittings. No help. The water is coming right from where the fill valve goes through the bottom of the tank. The fill line and it's fittings are dry, but the bottom of the tank is wet. Pull the fill valve and inspect it. No apparent problems. Hook it all up again and turn on the water and, yes, we still have a leak. Must be an invisible crack in the stupid plastic fill valve. This has happened to me once before. I suspect we have higher than normal water pressure here. It was 90 PSI when we moved in, and it is apparently just as strong now.

Video of leak. You can see a drop of water appear on the threads in the first few seconds of the clip. After that it just slowly gets bigger. I was lucky, I was looking right at it the first time I tried to capture this.


Toilet fill valve leak

Crack visible when pipe is stressed.

Picture of fill valve at rest. You can see where the crack is. This wasn't visible before I put pressure on it.

The broken handle (#3 on the list) wasn't a big problem, just annoying, since I had already replaced the handle once. This time it just fell off. I drilled a hole in it, put some glue on it, and screwed it back into place. So far, so good.

The wet floor (#2) was a big friggin' disaster. One day I look down I notice the floor is awash. What's going on?!?! Pull the toilet, pull up the water logged, fancy pressboard tiles, which requires cutting them. No obvious problem with the toilet. There is a water trail from the corner of the room to the toilet. This is in the basement against an outside wall where I have been having drainage problems. So, is the water coming from the toilet, and flowing to the wall? Or is it coming from the wall and flowing to the toilet?

I put the toilet back and leave the torn up floor as is. For a while. Six months or a year. No evidence of water. Call the fix it man to fix the tile floor. When he goes to replace the toilet, he tells me the base is too low. This time he puts in two wax gaskets. So far so good.

Seems the plumber didn't allow for the 3/8" for the fancy pressboard tiles. Didn't know at the time. The guy who installed the tile didn't do anything about it either. I guess this is why you hire a general contractor for these kind of jobs. That way you have someone to yell at when things go haywire. As it is, it's probably been ten years since the floor was put in, so not perfect, but not bad.

Bonus: I'm disassembling the old fill valve the better to stuff it in the trash can and I notice that the float arm is apparently solid brass. Score!

Note: The new fill valve cost all of $7.50, is made of plastic and is assembled in Mexico. Doesn't say where the parts are made, but the big surprise is that it wasn't made in China.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.