My team at Rocketman Plumbing specializes in fast repairs done right. We handle plumbing, heating, and cooling to keep your home or business running comfortably. Whenever you have a little plumbing problem, you can call us and we’ll come out and take care of it for you. But there are quite a few little plumbing jobs that you could probably handle yourself, and I’m going to go over a few of those with you.
How to Fix a Toilet That Won’t Stop Running
If your toilet runs, meaning it kicks on and kicks off, lots of times that’s a simple problem with the flapper that goes into the bottom of the toilet tank. Your flush handle attaches to a stick inside the toilet tank. Connected to that is a chain, which has a rubber flap or plug at the end of it. When you flush the toilet, it lifts the flapper open. Then when you release the handle, it closes and your tank refills with water.
Sometimes the bottom of your flapper can get warped, which means it doesn’t get a good seal. When that happens, you’ll hear water constantly going through your toilet. You can get a standard Korky flapper from your local hardware store, and those are good for about 90% of toilets. It has two little ears on either side that connect to your flush valve. All you have to do is look at how the old flapper is installed in your tank, pull it off, and replace it with the new one. You should be able to easily attach the new flapper to your flush valve and attach the new chain to your flush handle.
When you do this, you want just a little slack in the chain. When it’s all the way down with the flapper sealing the hole in the bottom of your toilet tank, you want just a little slack of about one chain link so that it can get a proper seal but will still lift up when you push the flush handle down. That fixes a running toilet a good portion of the time, and that’s all we have to do if we go to your house to handle it for you. It takes about 10 minutes, and yet we still have to charge you for an hour. So this is an easy plumbing problem that you could handle by yourself to save money and time.
How to Fix a Clogged Bathroom Sink
If your bathroom sink isn’t draining at all or is draining slowly, a lot of times, the only problem is hair stuck in the drain. If your sink has a faucet with a built-in drain plug, most often the problem is hair stuck in that plug. This is easy to fix. All you have to do is reach behind your sink and locate the thin metal rod in back of the drain pipe. Feel along that, and you’ll find a bolt that you can unscrew. Make sure you or a friend are holding on to the plug in your sink basin while you unscrew the bolt. Once you unscrew the bolt, you can pull out the thin metal rod, and then you’ll be able to pull out the entire plug from the sink basin.
After it’s out, you can clean the plug itself. Then you need to clean out the drain to make sure there’s no hair still stuck in there. You can get something like a pen, a long knife, or a simple drain cleaning tool. Stick it down the drain and pull out the clog. When it’s clean, all you have to do is line up the hole at the bottom of the plug with the hole in the back of your sink. Stick the plug back in the drain, stick the thin metal rod back in where you found it, and tighten that bolt up again. It’s kind of tricky but it’s worth trying to do.
Then you want to turn the water on and check underneath your sink with a flashlight to make sure there’s not a leak going on right there. It’s very simple to do, and lots of people could handle this by themselves.
How to Fix a Bad Toilet Flush Handle
Sometimes your toilet’s flush handle goes bad, sometimes it rusts and it breaks. A toilet flush handle is incredibly easy to change out. You can go inside the toilet tank to unscrew your old flush handle and pull it out, then put in a new one, which you can grab at any hardware store. Once you put the new one in the hole, you screw it in place. In the case of toilets, “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey” does not apply—you actually turn the cap to the left to tighten it. So once it’s on, you can then take the chain from your flapper and attach it to the new rod of your flush handle.
Make sure that when you flush that the flush handle rod isn’t hitting the top of the toilet tank lid. Also ensure there’s a little bit of slack in the chain, about one chain link’s worth of slack, and that’s usually just about right. It’s very easy to do, and if you want to try and tackle it, you need no tools at all to replace your toilet flush handle.
How to Fix Low Water Pressure in a Faucet
Now, another problem that lots of people have is a faucet that you’re not getting hardly any water pressure out of. When not much water is coming out of your faucets either on the hot side or the cold side, 99% of the time, the problem is simply in the aerator at the end of the faucet. This can get clogged, so all you need to do is grab a pair of pliers and loosen it just a little bit. Then you’ll be able to unscrew it all the way. Once you pull the aerator out, you’ll see the very fine screen inside of it. That can get clogged, so all you have to do is wash it out, scrape it off the best you can, and then just put it right back in your faucet. Screw it right back in.
Sometimes these aerators get so plugged up that you can’t clean them out. If that’s the case, take it out and go to a hardware store. Take the aerator with you, and you can go to the plumbing section and buy a new one for about $3 or $4. It’s important to take your old aerator with you because there are four different sizes of these aerators. If you take the one with you, you’ll be sure and get the one you need. Then you can take the new one home, screw it into your faucet, and it’ll be good as new.
Call Rocketman for Expert Repairs Done Right
If you want to tackle these things yourself, go ahead. If you have problems or don’t want to mess with it, give the team of top Albuquerque plumbers at Rocketman Plumbing a call at 505-375-6602 and we’ll come take care of it for you in a flash.