The toilet was always oozing: a grandfather's way to end a problem
How tired I am of struggling with the same problem. You repair the toilet cistern, it takes several months and it leaks again.
One side, Nothing serious. Just barely noticeable through the valve begins to ooze water from the tank into the toilet.
On the other side, cubic meters of water aimlessly flow into the sewer, a red trail of water stone appears, which you can’t wash off with, and even the wife looks askance with the subtext “what kind of a master is armless in the house”.
I seemed to have tried everything that could fix a leak in the toilet, but nothing worked. After a couple of months, maximum six months later, the leak appears again. A plumber from deep in the USSR helped to defeat the leakage.
If you have encountered a similar problem, then you know that the drain valve is the cause of the leak. The gum accumulates mucus, water scale deposits, or grains of sand from dirty water fall under it. As a result, the rubber seal does not fit tightly and a leak appears.
First, I disassembled the tank, wiped the rubber band of the valve and this solved the problem for a while. Fortunately, fittings in modern tanks are easy to get - just turned it counterclockwise, click and you're done. When it stopped working, flip the rubber seal upside down. But over time, the rubber band of the valve "hardened".
What could be easier than replacing one cuff with another, you ask. The difficulty lies in the fact that these consumables cannot be found. I had to change the assembly of the tank fittings, and this is not two kopecks.
My problem was solved at the mother-in-law's anniversary. In the evening, when everyone took the necessary share of alcohol, the "professional battles" began. One of the guests, an experienced plumber, began to tell that the housing and communal services are based only on him. If not for him, everyone would have been flooded long ago, and fecal runoffs poured out of the windows in a stream.
I perked up. The slop from the windows is, of course, sad, but my problem is more mundane. It seems that the plumber did not even think for a split second: "This problem is a hundred years old, hang a weight on the valve and forget about this leak from the toilet cistern." Probably, there was confusion in my surprised eyes, so he added something like this:
“The valve in the toilet cistern is closed by the hydrostatic pressure of the water column above it. When the elastic is perfectly clean and firm, that's enough. But if there is at least some flaw on the surface, the pressure is no longer enough and water oozes. Accordingly, any overload from above helps the valve to close tightly. "
And you know what, this method worked. I fixed the surcharge on the overflow pipe and forgot about the problem. And at the same time I thought to myself that our life is somehow not arranged so. A real engineer cleans toilets and climbs dirty wells, and in design bureaus there are dropouts who have seen plumbing fixtures only in drawings and photographs.
I have nothing against the valve device. I am sure it was once invented by a competent engineer. The simpler the design, the more reliable. But in a modern toilet cistern there are a lot of rods and levers. Was it really impossible to provide for some kind of penny spring that would press the valve and reliably shut off the water?
The trend of our time is not reliability, but the maximum reduction in price. Everything is flimsy to the point of disgrace. Therefore, if you want to repeat this trick, but you have some cheap Chinese fittings, be sure not to break anything with a weighting agent. Be careful!