The Ones That Do Not
Announce Themselves.

🔇 A Clog at Least Has the Decency to Tell You

There is a page on this site about stopped drains and stopped toilets, and those are the loud failures. Water stands where it ought to be leaving. You cannot miss it and you cannot live with it, so it gets dealt with that afternoon.

This page is about the other half of the plumbing bill.

These do not stand in the sink. They do not smell. Nothing overflows and nothing stops working. A toilet runs on quietly in a back bathroom. A kitchen tap gets a little weaker every year, so slowly that you adjust to it without ever once deciding to. A rubber hose behind the washing machine spends eleven years getting older.

Every one of them is cheap to put right.

And every one of them costs more the longer it is left, which is the difference between this list and the other one.

A clog costs you an afternoon and then it is over. These charge you rent.

🚾 The Running Toilet Is the Expensive One

A toilet that will not stop running is not a plumbing emergency. That is precisely why it goes on running, sometimes for years, in a bathroom nobody much uses.

Here is what it is costing.

The Environmental Protection Agency puts the average household’s leaks at more than 9,300 gallons a year, and says nine per cent of homes are leaking fifty gallons a day or more — with a worn toilet flapper at the head of the list of causes. Their own advice is that a flapper ought to be replaced every five years whether it is misbehaving or not, because when the rubber goes the toilet will either flush by itself or leak silently.

Nine thousand gallons is not a number anybody can picture, so here is another way to hold it. It is a bathtub filling itself and emptying itself, over and over, every day, all year, in a room you walk past.

The flapper — about six dollars, ten minutes, no tools

The flapper is the rubber disc at the bottom of the tank that lifts when you press the handle and drops back to seal. Rubber perishes. That is the whole story.

Shut the water off at the little valve behind the toilet, flush to empty the tank, unhook the old flapper from its two ears and the chain from the handle arm, hook the new one on. Turn the water back on. That is it. There is no tool in the job at all.

Take the old one to the store with you. They are not all the same and the picture on the packet will not tell you.

The fill valve — about fifteen dollars, twenty-five minutes, one wrench

If the dye test is clean and the thing still runs, the trouble is the fill valve — the tall column on the left that lets water back in and is supposed to know when to stop.

Shut off, flush, sponge the last inch out of the tank, put a towel under it. There is one plastic nut underneath the tank holding the valve in and one holding the supply line on. Both come off by hand more often than not, and with a wrench when they do not. New valve in, nut up hand tight and then a gentle nudge, supply line back on, water on, set the float so the water stops about an inch below the overflow tube.

A plumber charges a call-out minimum for this. It is fifteen dollars and one nut.

🚰 The Tap That Went Weak

Somebody says the water pressure in their kitchen has gone bad. Nine times in ten the pressure is perfectly fine and the little screen in the end of the spout is full of grit and lime.

It unscrews. That is the entire repair.

Turn it anticlockwise as you look up at it — by hand usually, and with pliers and a rag round the chrome if it is stuck. Inside there is a screen and a plastic insert. Soak the lot in white vinegar for an hour, brush it with an old toothbrush, put it back the same way round it came out.

Five minutes. No money at all, unless the screen is torn and wants replacing, which is about three dollars.

If every tap in the house is weak at once, this is not your problem — that is a pressure question for the whole house and a different conversation. One weak tap is an aerator. Nearly always.

🧵 The Twenty Dollars That Prevents the Flood

This one is not a repair. Nothing is wrong yet. That is the point of it.

Behind every toilet and under every sink there is a short flexible line carrying water to the fixture. On older work those are rubber with a woven jacket, and rubber has a life. When one lets go it does not drip. It opens, and it goes on delivering house pressure into the room until somebody turns it off.

If that happens while you are at the shops, you come home to a wet floor. If it happens while you are at your daughter’s for a fortnight, you come home to a different house.

Braided stainless lines cost about ten to fifteen dollars and take twenty minutes. Shut off the little valve, unscrew the old line at both ends with an adjustable wrench, screw the new one on hand tight and then a quarter turn. No thread tape — these seal with a rubber washer and tape only makes a mess of it.

Do the washing machine hoses at the same time. Those are the biggest ones in the house and they carry pressure every hour of every day, and they are behind a heavy appliance where nobody has looked since it was delivered.

🛠️ The Wax Ring, and Who Helps You Lift It

A toilet that seeps at the floor, or rocks slightly, or has left a stain on the ceiling below it, usually wants a new wax ring. The ring is the seal between the bottom of the toilet and the pipe in the floor, and it is made of wax because wax does not perish. It just gets squashed flat over thirty years, or the toilet gets rocked loose and breaks the seal.

The part costs about eight dollars.

Now, the honest difficulty here is not the plumbing. Every step of it is simple. The difficulty is that a toilet weighs somewhere between sixty and a hundred pounds and has to come straight up and be set down again without being dropped.

Which is a job for a homeowner, or for a homeowner and a couple of friends, and that is a perfectly respectable way to own a house.

It is also the argument of this entire site standing in a bathroom. The tools do not care whose hands are on them. You are not hiring strength — you are hiring somebody to know what to do, and the knowing is on this page for nothing.

The order of it: shut the water off and flush, sponge the tank and the bowl dry, take the supply line off, take the tank off, prise the caps off the two bolts at the floor and undo the nuts, rock the bowl side to side until the old wax lets go, lift it away and lay it on an old towel.

Scrape the old wax off the flange and off the bottom of the toilet. It is unpleasant and it takes ten minutes. New ring on, toilet back down square over the bolts, press it down with your weight and do not rock it back and forth once it is seated.

One more thing worth knowing before you buy the part. There are waxless seals now — rubber or foam instead of wax — and they cost a few dollars more. The reason to consider one has nothing to do with how well it seals.

Wax seals once. Set the bowl down crooked and you take it back up and start again with a new ring. A waxless seal can be lifted and set down a second time without being spoiled, which is worth the extra few dollars on the day three people who have never done this before are trying to land a heavy thing squarely over two bolts none of them can see.

🪑 The Ten-Minute One That Changes the Most

Two bolts, usually plastic, usually reachable from underneath the back of the bowl. Ten minutes and about twenty-five dollars.

It is on this page because of what else it can do while it is off.

Standard toilets sit around fifteen inches to the rim. A comfort-height or right-height toilet sits about seventeen to nineteen, which is chair height, and the difference between those two numbers is the difference between standing up out of a chair and standing up out of a hole.

You cannot change the bowl in ten minutes. But a thicker seat, or a raised seat, buys you a good part of it for the price of a seat, and it comes off again when the person who needed it does not any more.

There is a calculator on this site that works out the right height for a particular person rather than a general one. It is worth two minutes before you buy a seat.

🔑 Find the Main Shutoff Before You Need It

This is not a repair either, and it may be the most valuable quarter of an hour on this whole site.

Somewhere there is one valve that stops all the water coming into your house. Most people have never touched theirs. Some could not tell you within thirty feet where it is.

Go and find it. Then turn it off, and turn it back on.

That second part is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters. A valve that has not moved in twenty years is very often a valve that will not move at all, and the night a line lets go at eleven o’clock is a poor time to find that out with water coming through a ceiling.

If it will not turn by hand, that is a real finding and worth a plumber’s visit on a calm Tuesday rather than an emergency call-out on a wet Saturday. Ball valves — the sort with a straight lever — are far better than the old round wheel sort, and swapping one is an hour of somebody’s time.

While you are down there, find the little valves behind each toilet and under each sink and work those too. Those are the ones you will actually reach for, and they seize just as readily.

Then tell somebody else in the house where it is. A shutoff only one person can find is half a shutoff.

📡 Catching It While It Is Still Cheap

Everything above assumes somebody is there to notice. The reason water does real damage to a house is almost never the size of the leak. It is the number of days.

There are three ways to shorten that, and they cost three different amounts.

The free one — read your own meter

Turn off every tap and appliance in the house, go out and read the water meter, then leave it two hours without a drop being used and read it again. If the numbers moved, water is going somewhere it should not.

That test finds the running toilet, the dripping tap and the line weeping under the house, and it costs nothing but the walk out to the meter.

The cheap one — a puck on the floor

Most alarm and home security systems now sell a small flood sensor that sits on the floor and hollers when it gets wet. They are cheap, they run for a year or two on a battery, and they will call your telephone from two states away.

But be clear about what they catch, because it is easy to put one in the wrong place. A puck beside a toilet will never once notice a running toilet — that water goes into the bowl and down the drain and never touches the floor. What the puck catches is the sudden failure: a supply line letting go, a cracked tank, an overflow, a wax ring beginning to seep.

So the dye test and the meter catch the quiet leak. The sensor catches the fast one. They are two different jobs and you want both.

Where to put them, in the order that matters:

• The water heater, and it is not close. They fail from the bottom, they fail without warning, and they hold forty or fifty gallons ready to go.
• Behind the washing machine. Biggest hoses in the house, and nobody has looked back there since delivery day.
• Under the kitchen sink — a cabinet floor with a leak in it can stay wet for months before it shows anywhere you can see.
• Under bathroom vanities, then the dishwasher, then the base of each toilet.

The one that catches everything — and you have it fitted

A flow monitor sits on the main line and watches for water moving when nothing in the house should be running. That is the signature of every leak on this page at once, including the silent ones the puck cannot see, and the better ones will shut a valve on their own when the pattern looks wrong.

That one goes on the main, which puts it on the far side of the line this site draws. You choose it and you have somebody fit it.

🛑 The Short List of Things to Leave Alone

Everything above is a nut, a washer or a rubber part. These are not, and the difference is worth being plain about.

Gas water heaters. The tank, the burner, the flue and the gas line all stay somebody else’s work.

Anything soldered, and anything behind a wall or a ceiling. If the repair starts with opening the house up, it is not on this list.

The main shutoff itself, if it will not turn. Finding out is your job. Replacing it is not.

A soft or spongy floor. Around a toilet, under a sink cabinet, anywhere. That is rot in the structure and a new seal on top of it only hides how long it has been going on.

Sewer smell that will not go away, or more than one fixture backing up at once. That is the main line and it wants a camera, not a hand tool.

Water that has been standing in a house for days. Once carpet, plasterboard and cabinet bases have been wet a while, drying it out properly is its own trade and getting it wrong grows things you cannot see.

⚖️ Why These Belong on the List

Look back at what is actually on this page.

A six-dollar rubber flapper. A screen soaked in vinegar. Two braided hoses. A valve turned off and on again. A packet of wax. Not one of them is difficult and not one of them is expensive.

What every one of them has in common is that nothing goes wrong today.

That is what makes them easy to leave, and it is exactly what makes them worth doing at fifty rather than at seventy-five. At fifty you get under the sink because you happened to think of it. At seventy-five you get under the sink because water is coming through the kitchen ceiling, and getting under a sink is a different proposition by then, and so is finding somebody who can come out today.

The flapper costs the same six dollars either way.

What changes is whether you were on your knees on a Saturday afternoon with a cup of coffee going cold on the counter, or on the telephone at eleven at night trying to explain to a stranger where your water shutoff is.

And you cannot answer that second question unless you went and found it on some ordinary afternoon, years earlier, when nothing whatever was wrong.

Elsewhere on this site, if it is useful: