Most people would immediately call their landlord when their toilet stops working probably. (I think. I don't actually know most people, so this could be a faulty assumption.) Me? Nope. As long as it's quasi-functioning, I muddle-through, telling myself I'll figure out what's wrong with it but lazing out of actually doing it until it stops working entirely. At which point I finally do the requisite Googling, and then realize I'm going to have to call my landlord anyway.

But I have learned a great deal about toilets while Googling, and I figured out a way to jerry-rig my system so that I can trick my toilet into functioning until someone can come and actually fix it. I am posting this knowledge here in case it can help anyone else.

Basically, my toilet won't stop running. It wasn't overflowing, but water kept running. This is because my flapper isn't closing properly. Unfortunately, the flapper doesn't snap off by itself so I can't just replace that - it looks like the entire system would need to be replaced, which is why I'm not comfortable trying to fix it myself.

My understanding of how toilets work, based on everything I've Googled today:

Gravity is toilet magic. Your toilet tank is filled with water. When you push down on the toilet handle, it lifts the flapper, which covers the hole that connects the tank to your toilet bowl. The water flows out of the tank into the bowl, and pushes the dirty toilet water down the bowl and into the sewage system. When the flapper is placed down again, that hole is blocked and your tank is given a chance to refill. This refilling is critical, because if there isn't enough water in your tank, there won't be enough water to force the dirty toilet bowl water down into the sewage system. Because my flapper isn't closing properly, the tank never fills.


My temporary solution was to fill a gigantic pot in my bathtub and dump that water into the tank. If I dump enough water in quickly enough, the tank has enough water pressure to force the dirty bowl water down when I flush.

Not an ideal solution, but it will get me through until someone fixes it.


For the curious, this is a really good guide to how to diagnose/fix a toilet.