The dreaded occurred just a few days ago, my toilet stopped working. Luckily I do have more than one bathroom, so it wasn’t the worst, but still not a good feeling. It was draining just fine, it’s just the tank wasn’t filling back up.
So I did some tinkering. It seemed that if I shut the line off then back on, then the tank would fill. I thought that a bit strange, but after doing some research figured that the fill valve maybe had some sort of block in it. I followed some hardly videos and tutorials to try flushing the fill valve
Flushing it was pretty easy, you shut off the line, then remove remove the fill valve cap (which I’m always terrified of breaking things). Inspecting the cap, it was surely dirty, but didn’t see anything that would be causing a block or anything wrong with the washer. So I held a cup over the open fill valve and turned the water on from the line and let it run for a bit, hoping that it might flush anything out.
Unfortunately that didn’t seem to do the trick, so my next option was to just replace the fill valve. It was clearly quite old and dirty, and at under $10 why not. Picked one up at Lowes and got to work.
Replacing the previous fill valve only took probably 20 minutes in total. That was with me double checking each and every step! When I was all done, I turned the line on and watched the tank fill up. It was beautiful to behold.
Gave the toilet a few flushes, and made some minor height adjustments to the water level and do believe I have a working toilet again. I know it isn’t the most complex plumbing task, but it still felt pretty good to be able to fix something on my own (with a lot of help from the internet of course).