Do you live in a house where you have to wait what seems like forever to have your toilet fill up after a flush? I did too; I have lived in the same apartment for over a year now. It is a 2 family house and the bathroom decor looks like it is from 20 years ago. The sink, bathtub and toilet is yellow but made by a well-known company called American Standard. The structure of the toilet is all in great condition but there has to be a reason why the toilet wouldn’t flush faster and more effectively. The toilet would take forever to not just flush but you could not use the bathroom after someone else for at least 5 minutes. After a year of this going on, I would complain a lot about this, even my son who was being potty trained last year was getting frustrated at how slow the toilet was.
Last week I couldn’t take it the slow filling toilet anymore, I seem to spend more time waiting for the toilet bowl to refill than I would spend time in there all together. My husband told me that we did not need a new toilet but a new toilet fill valve and he suggested I pick one up called a Fluidmaster 400A. I had no idea what the heck that was but my husband was a plumber for over 15 years so he explained that it was a fill valve that provides water to the toilet and our was all gummed up with debris and needed to be replaced. He told me If we installed a new one, we wouldn’t have to wait more than 60 seconds for the toilet tank to fill up again and that means double flushing is a problem no more. He mentioned to me that the next time I went shopping I should stop at Walmart and pick up a Fluid Master 400A Toilet Fill Valve in the plumbing repair section of the store.
When I went shopping the next day, I stopped at Walmart, I found the 400A Fill Valve right away on the store shelf and I was very happy to see that it was priced under $10 dollars. I purchased the Fluidmaster Toilet Fill Valve and went about my shopping and then checked out of the store with a smile on my face knowing when I got home the boys where ready to fix my toilet. When I did get home my husband and my 5-year-old son went and gathered the needed tools which were only a pair of channel locks and an open end wrench. They then went into the bathroom with the tools and started to repair the toilet. First they removed the toilet tank lid and shut the water off to the toilet bowl. They then removed the old toilet bowl valve that was causing my toilet to fill slowly and replaced it with the Fluidmaster 400A. Before you knew it, I had a new Toilet Fill Valve installed inside of my toilet bowl.
After they were done installing the new 400A Fill Valve I was wondering how long it would take to refill the toilet tank. So I decided to flush the toilet to give it a test run. To my surprise, the second all the water flushed down the bowl, I could here the water racing into the toilet tank and the toilet tank filled up in under one minute. Compare this to the 5+ minutes I would have to wait for my toilet to fill with the old toilet fill valve and you can only imagine why I was so excited when I saw how fast my toilet tank now filled just because we decided to repair the toilet.
When we now flush our toilet it fills fast and works like a charm. We saved a lot of money and the part was installed within 10 minutes. Who knew that repairing a slow filling toilet was so easy and simple. Next time, you get frustrated with your toilet, find out if the fill valve has gone bad and if it has, check out the Fluid Master 400A Fill Valve. It will cost you less than $ 10.00 and only a few minutes of your time to have your toilet filling fast.