These simple DIY maintenance tips will help prevent bathroom plumbing issues and save you money on repairs.
Use Food Colouring to Find Tank Leaks
If your toilet won’t stop running, it may be because it’s leaking. To determine whether your toilet has a leak, do this simple test: put a few drops of food colouring into your toilet tank. Do not flush your toilet. Wait 25 minutes. Check your toilet bowl. Is the water in your toilet bowl dyed with the food colouring from your toilet tank? If yes, that means you have a leak.
Stop an Overflowing Toilet
Uh oh. The water in your toilet bowl keeps rising, and you can tell that it’s going to overflow any second now. What are you supposed to do now? Immediately remove the lid of your toilet tank and push down the flapper. The flapper is the rubber piece that is connected to the flush valve. When you flush the toilet, the flapper lifts to trigger the flush, then settles back down to end the flush. If your toilet bowl is filling up, you want to end the flush as quickly as possible, so pushing the flapper down will achieve that and bides you some time to call a plumber when you just have a full toilet bowl as opposed to an overflowing one.
Use Drain Strainers
One of the best preventative plumbing maintenance steps you can take in the bathroom is to use drain strainers. Hair is the main culprit when it comes to bathroom clogs (especially if you have a furry friend that you bathe in your bathtub or sink), and drain strainers are a super simple, effective way to prevent hair from washing down the drain and causing blockages.
Be Mindful of What You Flush
To keep your toilet in the best shape possible, never flush anything but toilet paper and bodily waste. Yes, that even goes for those wipes and other products marked “flushable”. Even items that are advertised as flushable should not be flushed down the toilet because they take a long time to break down in your pipes and can easily cause clogs in the meantime.
These DIY maintenance tips will help prevent plumbing problems in your bathroom, but every now and again you will need repairs. When that happens, call Pink Plumbing Today