Toilet repair and replacement in Los Angeles
We repair and replace toilets across Los Angeles, in houses, condos and apartment units from Eagle Rock to Westchester, and in Glendale, Burbank, Culver City, Santa Monica, Inglewood and the rest of the county. The parts that wear are few and well known: the flapper and fill valve in the tank, the wax ring, flange and bolts under the bowl, and the shutoff stop on the wall. Most of them ride along on every call, so a typical repair is finished on the first visit once you have signed off on a written price.
Bungalows and Spanish Revival houses from the 1910s to the 1930s bring their own trouble. Their toilets drain through a cast iron closet bend, the elbow under the floor that turns the waste down toward the main line, often joined with lead and oakum. The flange above it is fastened to a wood subfloor, and when a wax ring fails, a little water escapes with every flush and soaks into that wood. Over time the subfloor softens, the screws lose their grip, the bowl starts to rock, and the rocking breaks the seal further. From the crawl space the plumber can usually see the stain, the condition of the closet bend and whether the wood is sound. Fixing it properly means lifting the toilet off, cutting out and replacing any rotted subfloor around the opening, repairing or replacing the flange, renewing the bend if it has cracked, and setting the bowl back down on a fresh seal. Shimming the base hides the rocking and leaves the cause.
Apartment buildings add a neighbor to every toilet leak. When a seal fails on the third floor, the first sign is often a brown ring on the second-floor ceiling, so the plumber confirms which unit and which fixture is leaking before any drywall comes down, and the building manager knows what is happening. Hard LADWP water causes the slower problems: scale coats fill valve washers and plugs the little rim holes that rinse the bowl until the flush weakens, and it locks up old multi-turn shutoffs so they snap or weep at the stem when someone finally turns them. Replacing that valve with a quarter-turn shutoff and a braided connector while the toilet is already off makes sense, and it appears as its own item on the written price. A fill valve that fails again soon after replacement, common on hillside streets with strong pressure, sends us to the pressure regulator. Porcelain with a crack is not patched. On a new installation the rough-in is measured first, the flange is raised to sit level with the finished floor, then a fresh wax ring and new closet bolts go under the bowl.
What we tend to find
- A warped flapper that lets water seep into the bowl around the clock
- A fill valve set too high, spilling water into the overflow tube
- Mineral scale on the fill valve or clogging the rim jets
- A flange screwed into softened, water-stained subfloor
- A cast iron closet bend cracked or leaking at its old joint
- A shutoff stop that is seized solid or drips at the stem
Signs a toilet needs a plumber
- The tank fills itself at night with no one using it
- The bowl shifts under your weight
- Soft, dark or damp flooring around the base
- A brown stain spreading on the ceiling below a bathroom
- It takes two flushes to clear, or the flush is barely there
- A musty smell from the crawl space under the bathroom
Repair or replace
Most toilets that seem worn out are not. Flappers, fill valves and seals are made to be replaced, and a sound bowl and tank will keep working for decades with fresh parts. A new toilet is worth it when the porcelain has cracked, when the bowl clogs every week, or when someone at home needs a taller seat. Water use is the other reason: the median house in the city of Los Angeles dates from 1965, and a toilet that came with it can use more than twice the water of a current model on every flush.
If parts will fix it, the plumber says so and quotes the parts. A replacement only goes on the written price when the toilet itself is the problem.
If the fault is past the bowl
A toilet can be the messenger for a problem farther down the pipe. Several slow drains, a bowl that gurgles while the washer empties, or plunging that only sends water sloshing back up: each points beyond the toilet, to the main drain under the house or the lateral that runs to the street. In the older parts of Los Angeles that lateral is often clay pipe, and street-tree roots work into its joints. It belongs to the property owner all the way to the public sewer main that LASAN maintains. In an apartment building, the blockage can sit in a stack that serves several units, so a camera locates it before anything is cut open. That camera and cleaning work has its own pages, under drain cleaning and sewer repair.
The quiet leak and the dye test
The costliest toilet leak is usually the silent one. When the flapper no longer seals, water slips past it into the bowl, and every so often the fill valve wakes up to replace it. Nothing overflows and nothing drips on the floor, so in the city of Los Angeles the first clue is often an LADWP bill that jumped for no clear reason. In a building with many units, one leaking toilet can run for months.
Testing for it takes a few drops of food coloring. Drip them into the tank, skip flushing for half an hour, then look: tinted water in the bowl means the flapper is letting go. While you have the bottle out, test every toilet in the house. A leak at the base is the more serious problem, above all over another unit or a crawl space full of wood framing, and that one is worth a call at any hour.