How To Tell if Your Toilet is Leaking

Is Your High Water Bill a Leaking Toliet

My water bill usually ranges between $45-$60 dollars. It has been that way for a good year and a half. Then three months ago my bill was $91. So I walked around the house and found a faucet in the boy’s bathroom was leaking. So I do what I always do, I grab the tools and work on tightening the handle to fix the leaking faucet. Then I waited for the next bill. The next bill was the exact amount as the previous bill so I figured they didn’t check the water but just repeated the bill before. I had a small inkling that maybe it was the toilet but I wasn’t sure how to tell if my toilet is leaking without it visibly leaking.

My bill came this past week and it was just over $109. The other possibility could be our sprinklers. However, I was originally told our sprinklers were on well water so I didn’t think that was the problem. Not knowing what else to do I contacted the water company, via email. I was surprised to find that after emailing them late in the evening one weekday I woke up the next morning to an email from them. They could not tell whether my sprinklers were on city or well water but they gave me a great tip on how to tell if your toilet is leaking.

How To Tell if Your Toilet is Leaking

The solution was simple and cost nothing:

• Put a few drops of food coloring into the back of your toilet.
• Wait at least 25-20 minutes and do not flush.
• Check to see if the water in your toilet bowl turns the color of the food coloring.

If you start to see color in your toilet bowl this means the flapper needs to be replaced because it is allowing water to seep out into the bowl and when the back of the toilet is filling back up. This happens all day long and can result in a larger-than-normal water bill.

Within 5 minutes the toilet in my master bathroom was almost completely green. This was the toilet I suspected most of leaking. I also found that the toilet in the boy’s bathroom also had a trace of green. I had been tinkering with this toilet for months trying to get it to work properly. While I’m not happy about the increased bills I’m thankful to the water company for giving me a great tip to find out how to tell if your toilet is leaking.