A little help from your plumber.
DIY plumbing
tips.
The toilet starts filling when nobody flushed. The disposal hums. You need the water off and don’t know which handle to turn.
Start with a tip. See what to check, what the result means, and when the job needs a plumber.
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10 tips in the DIY library
DIY TIP / 01Laundry Plumbing
Water comes up out of the washing machine standpipe. Before you snake it, find out if the drain can breathe.
A washing machine doesn't drain, it pumps, and a top-loader pushes up to 17 gallons a minute into a pipe that has to take every bit of it. Ten minutes with a five-gallon bucket tells you whether the line is actually blocked or just can't get air, and those two need opposite repairs.
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DIY TIP / 02Water Pressure / Pressure Regulator
The pipes bang when the water shuts off. Check the pressure before you buy an arrestor.
Banging, humming, whistling and ticking are four different faults with four different repairs. A fifteen-dollar gauge on a hose bib tells you whether an arrestor will fix the banging or do nothing at all, and it takes two minutes.
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DIY TIP / 03Shower / Tub Plumbing
The tub won't hold water. Almost everything that's wrong is behind two screws in the overflow plate.
Six different mechanisms all get called a tub stopper, and the repair is different for each one. Most of the time you never open a wall. And the hard part usually isn't the fix, it's getting the old one out.
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DIY TIP / 04Toilet Repair
Water around the base of the toilet. It isn't always the wax ring.
Five different faults put water on the floor by a toilet and they look identical once it spreads. Just over a third of people who replaced a part still had the leak, usually because the real problem was under the seal rather than the seal itself.
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DIY TIP / 05Hose Bib / Outdoor Faucet
The outdoor faucet is leaking. Where it leaks from decides the whole repair.
Three separate faults all get called a leaking hose bib. The most common one is a ten dollar part that unscrews off the end of the spout. The worst one split your pipe last winter and you're only finding out now.
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DIY TIP / 06Shower / Tub Plumbing
The tub runs and the shower dribbles. Find your diverter first.
The diverter is not one part. It sits in one of three places depending on how your shower was built, and the repair is different in each. Find yours before you buy anything.
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DIY TIP / 07Shower / Tub Plumbing
The shower drips. Identify the valve before you buy the cartridge.
Six different faults all look like one drip, and the wrong cartridge fixes none of them. Figure out which one you have, identify your valve while the water is still on, and buy the part once.
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DIY TIP / 08Shutoff Valves
Find your main shutoff before you need it. The valve in the yard probably isn't it.
Along the Wasatch Front the capped valve in your lawn is almost always the sprinkler shutoff, not the house shutoff. And the real one has a habit of leaking the first time it's turned in twenty years.
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DIY TIP / 09Garbage Disposal
The disposal hums but won't turn. Switch it off before you try again.
A hum means power is reaching a plate that can't move, and holding the switch cooks the motor. The reset button is free and most people skip it. And if it's leaking from the bottom, stop — that one isn't repairable.
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DIY TIP / 10Toilet Repair
The toilet refills by itself. The flapper is only half the story.
A new flapper is everyone's first move and it's right about half the time. Listen to it before you buy anything: a short refill every few minutes and a constant run send you to opposite ends of the tank.
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