Help with toilet please.

Factual Questions
1

Quick question for those you have more experience fixing toilets than me.

For a couple weeks my toilet has been making a horrible whining-schreeching sound while the tank refills. Now today it barely fills at all even with the ballcock falling all the way down. So I’m guessing the inlet valve system is screwed. What is the cheap way to fix it. Do I need to replace the whole refill tower thing, or do I just need to get a peice inside of it? Are the parts pretty standard? It’s an average American low-flow toilet. Do I need anything special like caulking, or gaskets when I replace it, Or are they in kits with everything I need. Also How much money am I looking at for the parts?

Thanks in Advance.

I now go to dig in tons of snow to try to find my shutoff valve. :frowning:

2

You can probably just replace the valve - it will either be brass or plastic and generally they just bolt together with rubber washers to seal it against the entry hole in the cistern.

If you’re lucky, there will be an inline valve in the water pipe (often they look like a little silver pipe joint with a slotted screw in the side - if you turn the screw so that the slot is across the pipe, the water should stop), turn off the supply, then remove the valve and take it with you to the shop to get an exact replacement.

3

Actually, on thinking about it, it sounds like it might just be a foreign body blocking the valve - you might get away with just taking it to bits and cleaning it.

Are you in a hard water area?

4

If you do have to replace the innards of a toliet, it is not very difficult. It took me about 6 hours to replace everything, but I am not very handy.

The biggest difficulty I ran into was removing all the old stuff. I had to get out a chisel and chip the hell out of it.

And I giggled everytime I said “ballcock.”

5

Toilet fill valves are pretty simple to change. By the time you mess around with shutting off the water (usually at a valve directly under the toilet tank) draining the tank, sponding out the remaining water, mopping up the bit that fell out when you removed the valve and got the valve out, you may as well swap the unit. It’s certainly faster than taking it apart then going to the plumbing shop for parts as the pieces are decidedly non-standard among brands.

They’re usually cheap too. Around $10-15, last I looked.

6

At Home Depot, you can get a replacement valve (the “tower” part) for all of $7.44. For $19, you can get a complete repair kit, including the valve, a complete new flapper asssembly (the part that keeps the water in the tank from draining into the bowl until you flush), gaskets, and even a new chrome flush handle.

It just doesn’t make sense to spend more than a few minutes trying to repair the existing parts.

7

While you’re at it you might as well get a new supply line if it’s one of the old metal ones. Get a braided vinyl supply line and the job will go easier. Re-using the old metal line often results in a pesky leak. I can’t imagine the job taking more than an hour or two.