Check your toilets

[Eric Gutierrez]

Hi,
I just wanted to post about a fun experience I had this past Friday night at one of my rentals. At about 10:00pm I got a call from one of my tenants telling me that she just got home and found the toilet leaking water all over the bathroom & into the hallway and basement. Lucky for me the water was going into the laundry room and into a hallway with a tiled floor.

Anyways, long story short the rubber grommet between the tank and the bowl (2 piece toilet) rotted out causing the toilet to attempt to fill while the water came out the bottom of the tank. I'm just glad that my tenant found it reasonably quickly. She left to drop her roommate off at a bar (college rental) and came home to find it running. If it had gone all night, or if they had been out of town I can only imagine the swimming pool in the basement.

My plan is to go through my rental bathrooms and go ahead and replace all of the toilets. Fresh internals, fresh bolts, and fresh grommets. I'm a full believer in buying something of quality rather than the cheapest thing possible, so Im staying away from the $99 Home Depot/ Menards special toilets and going with a Toto Drake toilet. $189 with 2-day shipping off of Amazon Prime. I'm not going to do them all at once, but I just ordered two today. My current thinking is to have 1 model of toilet throughout all of my rentals to keep things simple.

When I do the toilet, I'm also going to replace the sink/ toilet shutoff valves with new quarter turn ball valves as referenced in
[url]http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/67/topics/73472-replace-those-compression-valves-with-1-4-turn-angle-valves

-Eric

[Darren Sager]

Since 1998 I've only used Toto. I researched the crap (no pun intended) out of toilets and found out from seasoned plumbers that Toto had the lowest amount of issues long term. Some of their parts aren't cheap but they last and are trouble free as long as you don't put the chlorine tablets in the tanks. That causes the Toto flap to "dry" out and water to leak into the bowl and down the drain.

Quarter turn ball valves are all I install too. Smart advice.