Pro Handyman Blog

A realtor asked me to come look at a toilet problem in a property he had listed. He is very hands-on and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. When I showed up he explained that the home inspector said that there was a problem in between the tank and the bowl, because when he flushed the toilet, water was leaking at this area.

Isolating the problem, with whatever is broken, is always the best coarse of action. Without knowing what the problem is, how can you fix it? So if the problem occurs when the toilet flushes, you can isolate this by not allowing the toilet to refill during this test.

I simply held the fill valve up simulating a full tank, and hence no water would run. But you could also turn off the angle stop at the rear of the toilet at the wall. So with the water off, flush the toilet and watch what happens. In this case, the toilet flushed fine with no leaks whatsoever. That eliminated the cause of the leak being the connection between the tank and the bowl.

The next thing to do is to allow the water to run. I simply removed my finger from the fill valve float allowing it to drop down and start refilling the tank. You could also turn the water back on to the angle stop, if you turned it off to isolate the flush. As soon as I removed my finger and the water started flowing, the leak was very obvious. Water was shooting out of the top of the fill valve that was cracked. What was happening was the water was spraying out soaking the underside of the tank lid and finally running over the rear of the tank where it finally dripped off of the toilet bowl on to the floor. Replacing the fill valve fixed the problem.