Home Improvement Tip: How to find a leaky toilet

This week will be the first of a multipart series in how to find the leak you may have in your toilet. This tip will help you if you have water puddling on the floor or you think your toilet might be running but aren’t sure.

Step 1: Clean the Toilet!
Cleaning the toilet and make sure the surrounding area is dry will go a long way towards making this process easier.

Step 2: Add Food Coloring to your toilet tank (red is easiest to spot) then flush the toilet.
After you’ve flushed the toilet give it a few minutes that take a dry paper towel and wipe around where the toilet meets the floor. If your paper towel turns red you now know where the leak is. (Most likely it’s the wax flange that the toilet rests on.)

Step 3: If you think the toilet might be running and want to be sure…
After you flush the toilet then add food die when the tank is half full. As the tank begins to fill, if it’s working properly the water should stay inside the tank. If you come back 45 mins later and see that water in the toilet bowl turning a red color you know that yes your water is running because you’ve got a leaky stopper.

Home Improvement Tip: Garbage Disposal Maintenance

As part our sponsorship of Home Ownership, we’re going to be giving a weekly home improvement tip here on our blog. Seeing as it’s week one, we thought we’d start with something simple: Garbage Disposal Maintenance.

Now some of you may already know the tricks listed below, but for those that don’t, try these over the next year to keep your disposal smelling fresh and running clean.

Tip number 1: Throw some ice cubes down the disposal every once in a while! (Note: you must be running cold water when you do this.) The common misconception is that doing this will sharpen the blades, but that is not the case. What the ice cubes do, is clean off any gunk or food that maybe collecting on the edges of the blades. This allows the blades to slice food better in the future. For those that want bonus points, make the ice cubes from lemon juice.

Tip number 2: Have you ever wondered why your dishwasher sometimes smells? The answer is your garbage disposal vents into your dishwasher. So if you’ve ever opened your dishwasher after doing a load of dishes and wondered why despite looking clean, they didn’t smell so hot, you now have your answer. The cure for this problem is to put some citrus into the disposal. Take either a lemon or an orange and cut it into quarters or slightly smaller pieces and then start sticking the pieces down 1-2 at a time and run the disposal. The citrus will get rid of the odor and hang around for a little bit so when you just turn on the water you’ll get that sweet smell as it goes down the drain.

Well that’s all for week 1! We hope we have helped some of you and encourage everyone to test out our tips this weekend!