Toilet leak question...

Have you replaced ALL the innards? The entire flush valve (which requires removing the tank from the bowl)? Have you tightened the bolts that connect the tank to the bowl?

I don’t know the vaseline trick, so I can’t speak to that.

-- Joe Cottonwood -- 99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses

yup! got all of it replaced, took the tank off and replaced that part as well. all bolts (even the bolts holding it to the floor) were tightened by dad. apparently the vaseline trick is to put vaseline on the flap to help it seal properly to troubleshoot if it’s the issue.

-- aspiring jill of all trades

Pretty hard to diagnose without seeing it. Sometimes a toilet gets hairline cracks in the porcelain that are nearly invisible—and impossible to repair.

-- Joe Cottonwood -- 99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses

I had this same sort of problem a few years ago when I installed a very good, but used toilet in my basement. I completely rebuilt the toilet and after installing it, the tank was always running water in to the bowl continuously. After many, many attempts to solve the issue, I found the the flush valve mechanism had a defect that was very hard to spot.

One trick you can try is to put food coloring into the tank after it’s full, the leak will pull the coloring to where it’s going out.

Usually but not always, it is the flapper and flapper seal. If it leaked for a bit (a few days), run your finger nail around the seal that the flapper sits on. What happens is the sealing edge gets a crack or a small erosion groove across the seal edge and at that point, it well never seal. The only remedy is to replace the flapper and seal fitting with new.

-- Love woodworking and fixing most anything