Hey everyone, this post was supposed to be on Friday, but I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things with posting again. Also, my wife recently celebrated her birthday so we went out for a nice dinner on Friday night. Long story short, this post is today instead of Friday. Baby steps.
Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It?
Yea, this is just kind of a short, fun side story in the adventure that is my life. Our house has been slowly getting improved over the last few years, but we’re still trying to figure out how to fix things. Recently, our toilet started making a whistling sound whenever it was flushed. This would last a few seconds or so and then eventually subside.
This is not new, it’s been happening off and on for a few months now. As you may know, I’m not a handyman by any means. My plan was to have my plumber come look at it (and the other toilets) to make sure everything was functioning ok.
However, with Coronavirus, it’s been difficult to get a hold of my plumber. He’s been inundated with other work to do and my whistling toilet isn’t a huge priority.
So what happened?
Well, unfortunately, we kept putting it off the whistling got worse. Sometimes it wakes my wife up at night and well she doesn’t sleep well as it is. So, after the kids played soccer today (masked up!), we let them watch a few movies we rented: Trolls World Tour and Playing with Fire. For what it’s worth, the kids liked both movies. I was actually surprised they liked Playing with Fire as much as they did — worth a rental I think.
Then we did what any home owners do when they have a problem they want to fix… we googled it:
Basically, we needed to to replace the seal of the water fill valve in the toilet. However, it’s better just to replace the whole water fill valve if you’re going to replace the seal. So the next step was to find a good tutorial video. I think this one is good:
Then what?
Well, we shut off the water at the shutoff valve. Then after removing our old water fill valve, we confirmed that the seal was warped and needed to be replaced. So we took a trip to the local hardware store and got the water fill valve that Home Repair Tutor recommended, because why not. It’s universal and has a 7 year warranty.
It’s this one: Fluidmaster 400H-002 Performax Universal Toilet Fill Valve
After a little bit of fiddling around, we installed the new water fill valve. However, our toilet was a slightly different style that didn’t use the exact same components. For example, we didn’t need the little clamp.
Anyways, long story short, after making sure the bowl water and toilet tank water levels were good, our toilet runs great again and silence is golden.
While I’m sure this is easy for other people. Since we generally shy away from these kinds of things, it was nice to fix it ourselves.
In the end, we’re not really Mr. and Mrs. Fix-It…
… but we tried to be, at least for today.
TL;DR
Fixed my whistling toilet today.
Silence is Golden.
-Sensei
Agree? Disagree? Questions, Comments and Suggestions are welcome.
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