You Will Never Have To Call A Plumber Again By Following These Simple Steps

After days of procrastinating, I finally fixed my toilet. Nothing’s better when you sit down to take a shit without hearing any noise. A few weeks ago, I was doing the same thing when I heard the toilet tank leaking inside.

I immediately knew that the fill valve was on its last legs and needed to be either repaired or replaced. Some of these valves can be rebuilt but I selected the latter.

First thing I had to do was turn off the water supply down below. Then I held the lever down to get as much of the water out of the toilet tank as possible. Now you will never get all of the water out by doing this method.

That’s when you need to grab a bucket and a sponge or a towel in my case and remove all the remaining water left in the tank. They have other tools that you can purchase that help you siphon the water out but I didn’t have any of those so I used an old towel rag and wiped up the water and squeezed it out in the pan I had.

This tank had a lot of crud in it from all that hard water buildup over the years. When I was done, I set all that stuff aside. You want to make sure that you have a big towel or a catch pan underneath your supply line when you’re getting ready to disconnect it.

I took off the water supply line to the fill valve. It wasn’t hard at all because I was unable to untighten it with my hand. Then I had to decide on how I was going to get that locknut loose from the tank.

Normally, these things are hand tightened but I couldn’t loosen it so I knew I was going to have to use a pair of pliers on it. Only problem was that I couldn’t get a good grip around that locknut because this bathroom cabinet being in the way.

I remember when I assembled this thing together some 23 years ago for my grandmother. We were doing a little bit of renovation on the place at the time and she had me take down the spring loaded cabinet and install this one in its place. My how time flies.

I ended up pulling out the cabinet and once I got that out, I was able to get the locknut loose and out came the old fill valve. This was a damn good one too. You can’t find one like this down at your local hardware store. You would probably have to go to a plumbing store or order this part online.

It was one of those Glacier Bay fill valves that had an extra jet to let out more water into the tank as the other one was attached to a tube that went on top of the overflow pipe.

I used one of those generic Fluidmaster fill valves that you would get down at Lowe’s and/or Home Depot whichever one you prefer. I had to look at the manual a little bit because it’s not every day that I replace one of these things so I wanted be sure how you adjusted this thing.

Important note: Before you tighten this up to your toilet tank, you want to make sure that the CLE line is 1 inch above your overflow pipe. I used a measuring tape to make sure that I had the inch. I also compared the new fill valve with the old valve that I took out for good measure.

Once everything is accurate, I simply HANDtightened the locknut against the toilet tank. Then I attached the water supply line to the new fill valve also HANDtightening that as well. All these fittings come with gaskets that will seal up the connections enough so you don’t need to torque anything at all.

I then turned the water back on and checked for leaks. Only thing I had to do was adjust the water line and bring it up to the water line that was inside my toilet tank.

I took a Phillips head screwdriver and gave it several turns while flushing in between each turn and monitoring the water level until I got it to where it was supposed to be. And that’s it. I put all the shit back and now I can shit in peace. Ain’t America wonderful!