After getting the toilet leak figured out in the master bathroom, I thought I was done fixing toilets.
A few months ago, Efiwym, my wife, and I started to notice the master bathroom toilet would be leaking from the tank into the bowl. After you flushed the toilet, you would hear water trickling from the tank. You would need to jiggle the flush handle to stop it. Sometimes that would not be enough, and you would need to re-flush the toilet. At times I would actually pull off the tank lid and re-seat the plunger. The final straw was the phantom flushes in the middle of the night.
I know Efiwym was getting frustrated that I was not making a better effort to fix the problem. As a Just-Okay-DIYer, you do not want to get into a project you do not want to do. So, you do a little bit here and a little bit more there to fix the problem.
We have two of these thirty-seven old Mansfield® toilets in the house. They are original to the house. We had three of these toilets until I broke the one in the main bathroom. Many years ago, it was a victim of over-tightening the anchor bolts and breaking the bottom of the toilet. I have replaced the fill valves on all these toilets in the past with ones that do not need the float to shut off the water. Flush handles never last long and have been replaced multiple times on each. There is not much to a toilet to “fix” a problem, so I knew I would find the problem and repair it.
The Mansfield® toilet has a plunger instead of a flapper to shut off the flow of water to the tank. This method has worked well until now. So, I started there. I first took out the plunger and tank seal to see if there was something obvious. The rubber tank seal had a definitive ridge where the plunger met the seal. I cleaned off the mineral build up around it and re-installed the seal and plunger. A few flushes and the problem was solved.
After a few days, the dribbling into the tank continued. If you got up in the middle of the night to pee, you would need to stand there until the flush was done to check for “the sound.” Nothing is worse than to get back into your comfy bed and you have to get back up to jiggle the toilet handle. We lived with this problem until we got the phantom flushes.
That was it for Efiwym. If I could not fix it, it would be time to buy a new toilet. I could not believe that a toilet does “go bad.” It is the fill valve or the seal, but I concurred, because I was lost for an answer. Now I know that are some of you that are thinking that I should get rid of these 3-gallon water wasters anyways. Okay, while I agree, I simply did not want to pull the toilet. I would not carry down and carry up the stairs an 80-pound piece of porcelain.
My final attempt was to replace the plunger rubber seal. Well, that did not work. It leaked worse than before. Could it be the plunger? How could this piece of plastic go bad. I inspected it and thought about replacing it. I finally put the old seal back on and put the new one on top of it. I could not believe that worked. A double layer of rubber should not have been the solution. Nonetheless, I will take it, knowing I did not need to check for the tinkling sound of the toilet as I got back in my comfy bed.