Fixing a Dual Flush Toilet

For about 6 months now Alyson and I have been dealing with a toilet that sometimes leaks water into the bowl and thus has to fill up the tank again. We found some workarounds that made no sense (twisting the valve) and it bought us enough time till this weekend.

Now this is a toilet system that I've personally never seen or dealt with at any point in my life till now. I grew up with flappers and this toilet has no flappers inside of it. Thankfully the lid had the exact model and details on common replacement parts for it.

Sadly that QR code goes to "Sorry, the campaign associated to that code has been completed. As a result, this QR code is no longer active." Which was very upsetting to start the investigation with. If you are printing long term physical labels - you'd probably want to be sure your short link / QR code logic is sound and not dependent on some 3rd party.

If we took a picture looking down into the tank - we had a solid idea of what the problem could be.

The very bottom of the tank had a seal that looked frayed and any physical contact against it led to it immediately disintegrating. We assumed that seal with the base was probably not doing its job anymore and letting a tiny stream of water leak back into the bowl.

We just didn't know what that piece was called as the parts called out on the label was the fill valve, flush valve and the seal on the actual removable middle piece. It seems the seal we were trying to fix was anchored to the base part of the flush valve. So we did some research and finally found the instruction sheet for the model we had.

This had a little arrow calling out the rubber gasket, which made sense as to the part we wanted to replace. Sadly this meant the tank was going to have to come off the toilet. This was the first time I've ever removed a toilet tank to repair a leak. You'd think after finding the part you'd need replaced that it would be easy to obtain.

After a trip to Ace Hardware (up the road) and Home Depot (15min away) I gave up not finding the part I needed. Everyone was very helpful and always had the "tank-to-bowl" part, but I needed the gasket that sat above the locknut on the bottom piece of the flush valve. I wasn't really confident myself on what I needed, but a few staff were, but at the end of day what I purchased did not work.

After purchasing 3 wrong seals it was time to just rebuy the exact same flush value we had (830VBGB). This wasn't available in any store I could quickly drive towards, so we did next day delivery and marked that toilet out of commission. It didn't seem possible to buy the exact seal I needed in our research. Thankfully buying 3 wrong seals didn't even pass $10 combined.

The next day the part arrived, so we turned the water off and got to work. One thing I quickly noticed is while this was the exact same part I presently had it surely wasn't identical. The plastic molding was different, the colors were different, the locknut was shorter, but it was effectively the same thing. It reminded me how there was like 8 different original Xboxes, even though they were all marketed as the same.

I found the seal hooked to the new part in a way that didn't seem like it wanted to be removed. So this repair became way simpler - just replace the entire valve. I used every new piece in the kit, which is where I continued to notice the differences between identical units years apart.

So we got to work threading the new valve through and tightening it up. This new gasket/seal was so much larger compared to the non-existent thing we removed. Who knows if that was just manufacturer improvement or decay on my old one. After painfully connecting so many washers, bolts, locknuts, gaskets and more we carefully turned the water back on and waited.

The tank filled up and it was silent. We flushed the toilet a few times and waited after it refilled and reconfirmed silence. We sat on the bed and scrolled social media in quiet just watching for the noise of the tank refilling and it never came. We conquered a toilet problem after complaining about the Fluidmaster support process, building the wrong parts and finally just buying a full replacement. It wasn't what I expected to do for most of the weekend, but now I feel a bit more comfortable repairing a toilet.