Source: Title: The tub won't hold water. Almost everything that's wrong is behind two screws in the overflow plate. \| Mountain Man Plumbing Content revision: 2bef464542b62757ea8f7212daca60b24d127be5c8eabab27fd15dc511ecca09 Source modified (WordPress record): 2026-09-19T16:17:38+00:00 Extracted at: 2026-10-25T18:42:33+00:00 Freshness: Stored anonymous publication. Refreshed in the background after content changes and daily; the previous successful version remains available during refresh. See extracted-at time. Live inventory requires its tool. ## On this page - [What's in the tub]() - [← DIY plumbing tips]() MOUNTAIN MAN PLUMBING / DIY Shower / 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. Mountain Man Plumbing · Updated Sep 19, 2026 The tub won't hold water. Almost everything that's wrong is behind two screws in the overflow plate. Water drains out of the tub while you're sitting in it. Or the stopper won't come out when you go to clean the hair off it. Both start in the same place. Look at the plate above the drain and see whether it has a small lever on it. That tells you where the mechanism is, and the rest follows from there. **This one can wait.** Nothing here is under pressure and a tub that won't hold water damages nothing. The exception is water showing up on the ceiling below or behind the tub, which is a different fault and is covered at the end. ### What's in the tub Of 118 who described their mechanism. Some named more than one. Trip lever on the overflow plate **51%** Pop-up with a rocker arm **33%** Push-pull, or a flip lever in the drain **9%** Lift-and-turn **9%** Toe-touch or foot-operated **6%** Plunger style, no visible stopper **4%** ## First, find out which one you have. A lever on that plate means the working parts are not in your drain. They sit inside the overflow tube behind the wall of the tub, hanging on a brass linkage. The drain itself may be nothing but a strainer that never moves. No lever means the stopper you can see is the whole mechanism. It threads onto a post in the drain, and the overflow plate is just a cover. Trip lever tubs come two ways: - **Plunger**, also called a drop cylinder or a lift bucket. A brass or plastic weight hangs on the linkage and drops into the fitting behind the tub to block the flow. The drain is a fixed grid, so nothing you can see moves when the lever is worked. - **Pop-up.** The linkage works a curved rocker arm under the tub that lifts a stopper sitting in the drain. Work the lever and watch the drain. If the stopper rises and falls, it's a pop-up. If nothing moves, it's a plunger. ## Getting to the parts. Two screws hold the overflow plate on. Take them out and pull the plate toward you. On a trip lever tub the linkage and the drop cylinder come out with it, hanging on a brass wire. It's a foot or more long, so pull it slowly and keep it over the tub. It will be black and greasy. You don't need to shut the water off for any of this. None of it is under pressure. ### How people reached the parts Of 66 who described getting access. Through the overflow opening **77%** From below — basement or crawl space **14%** Cut an access panel or opened a wall **12%** With the plunger out, the overflow tube runs straight down into the tub's trap. That's the route to snake a tub, rather than through the drain where the crossbars are in the way. ## What's usually wrong. Most advice on this goes straight to adjusting the linkage. It's worth knowing how, and it's covered below, but it is rarely the problem. ### What turned out to be wrong Of 93 who named a cause. Several named more than one. Corroded, seized or broken parts **53%** Hair and gunk on the linkage or stopper **31%** Wrong or mismatched replacement parts **24%** Worn seal or gasket **7%** Linkage out of adjustment **3%** Look the assembly over before you touch the adjustment. Usually you can see it: the cylinder crusted over, the wire rotted through, hair wrapped around the linkage. Clean it up, then check the brass linkage for a kink. Watco calls that one out specifically. A kink takes up travel, so the cylinder stops short of the bottom no matter how the rod is set. ## Adjusting a trip lever. Watco gives a target for this. The drop cylinder should [bottom out inside the tee slightly before the lever reaches fully closed](), so it hits bottom with a little lever travel to spare. The cylinder seals by dropping. If the tub won't hold water it isn't dropping far enough, so lengthen the linkage: loosen the lock nut, run the rod out, tighten the nut back down. If the tub is slow to drain it's sitting too low, so shorten it. A quarter turn at a time, testing as you go. The same Watco sheet says a slow drip from inside the tee is normal and acceptable. A trip lever tub doesn't seal the way a sink does. If yours loses a little water over a long soak, that's the mechanism, and adjusting won't change it. Not every trip lever adjusts with a threaded rod. Watco makes three other patterns. Slip Lock sets itself when you push the lever firmly to closed, and has a release button on the linkage to reset it. TurnStyle has a numbered scale on the overflow elbow, and you match the number on the linkage to the number on the scale. Quick Adjust is different again. Look at what you pulled out before trying to unthread it. ## Pop-up stoppers. Lift the stopper straight up and turn it counter-clockwise. The curved rocker arm slides out of the drain hole with it. Hair collects on that arm more than anywhere else in the assembly. Clean the arm and the seat it drops into, then put it back. If it does need adjusting, go a quarter turn at a time and watch the stopper while you do it. Which direction tightens the seal depends on how that rocker arm is arranged, and looking is quicker than working it out. If you can't get a pop-up adjusted and you end up pulling the stopper out, put a hair strainer in the hole. An open tub drain takes razor caps, hair clips and toys, and then you have a clog instead of a stopper problem. ## Stoppers that thread into the drain. Lift-and-turn, push-pull and toe-touch all screw onto a post down in the drain. Delta's instruction for theirs is to [unscrew counter-clockwise with the stopper in the full up position](). Three things get in the way of that: - **A hidden set screw.** Lift-and-turns often have a small screw on the side of the knob, or down on the shaft, taking a small flathead or an Allen wrench. Loosen it rather than taking it out, since you're working in about a quarter inch of space. Brass ones round off easily, so use a driver that fills the slot and push in hard while you turn. - **The cap comes off by itself.** That's normal on toe-touch. The cap unscrews from the plunger assembly and leaves a nut exposed underneath. Back the rest of the assembly out using that nut. - **It spins and never comes out.** The threads are stripped. Delta's answer is to pull up on the stopper while you turn it, so the damaged threads catch. If the stopper sits metal to metal on the drain and won't seal, it's missing a part rather than out of adjustment. There should be an O-ring or a gasket under the stopper head or around the shaft. Put some faucet grease on the threads and the post when it goes back together, so it comes out by hand next time. ## When the drain body has to come out. Sometimes the strainer body itself has to go: crossbars broken off, corroded solid, or threads stripped past saving. A basket wrench keys into those crossbars, so once they're gone it has nothing to grab. The tools for that grip the inside of the drain instead. A [Pasco drain key expands against the inside of the drain all the way around](), with steel shoes that won't mark a chrome finish, and their Smart Dumbbell handles drains with no crossbars at all. Both turn with a crescent wrench or a large Phillips, and run around thirty dollars. A seized drain in a steel or cast iron tub takes real force. That same force on a thin acrylic or fiberglass tub will flex the floor of it, so go carefully on those. ## Before you buy parts. The 1-1/2 inch marked on the box is the drain size, not the thread. Bath waste bodies come in two threads that don't interchange: | What the catalog calls it | Thread outside diameter | Threads per inch | | --- | --- | --- | | Coarse thread bath waste | 1.865" | 11.5 | | Fine thread bath waste | 1.625" | 16 | Watco lists 12 and 14 TPI variants in the same line as well. A new drain body that turns two or three times and then stops hard is the wrong pitch, and forcing it damages the shoe under the tub, which is the part you can't get at. Take the old strainer body to the counter with you. That only applies to the drain body. Swapping the stopper alone never touches those threads. On putty: Watco's instructions say not to use oil-based putty products, and state they won't warranty the drain if oil or petroleum based products were used to install it. The oils attack some plastics and stain porous surfaces, which matters on acrylic, fiberglass and composite tubs. Buy putty labeled stain-free, or use whatever the drain's own instructions call for. ## A slow drain with the stopper open is something else. If the stopper is out, or all the way open and clean, and the water still crawls away, you have a clog or a vent problem rather than a stopper problem. The overflow route above is still the useful part: pull the plate and linkage and you have a clear path down to the trap. ## When it's a call, not a repair. - Water shows up on the ceiling below, or behind the tub, when it's filled or used. That's the overflow gasket or the shoe, and both are behind the tub. - The drain body has to come out, the tub is on a slab or over a finished ceiling, and the drain key won't move it. - The strainer is seized into an acrylic or fiberglass tub hard enough that you can feel the tub floor flex. - Old cast iron where the shoe or the trap under the tub is corroded. That's cutting and refitting, not a stopper. - The crossbars are broken and the threads are stripped, and the assembly now spins in the shoe. [Tub and shower drain repair ↗]() · [The tub spout diverter isn't working ↗]() Where the numbers come from: 277 homeowner questions about bathtub stoppers and tub waste-and-overflow assemblies posted to public plumbing forums, scoped to threads about a stopper that had failed rather than new tub installs, drain-line plumbing or clogs, and sorted by what each person described. Because they count what people wrote down, each figure is a floor, not a census. Technical sources: Watco Manufacturing's Trip Lever Installation Instructions (Rev. 2/17) for the drop cylinder adjustment target, the kinked linkage warning, the Slip Lock and TurnStyle variants and the oil-based putty warranty condition; Watco's product guide for the coarse and fine bath waste thread specifications; Delta Faucet's stopper removal guidance for the counter-clockwise removal, the toe-tap cap sequence and the stripped-thread case; Pasco's tool catalog for the drain key and crossbar-less extractor. Every procedure here was checked against those documents. Related repair guides [Shower & tub plumbing ↗]() YOU CAN HAND IT OVER FROM HERE. ## Need a second set of eyes? Tell us what happened and what you’ve tried. - [Text a photo ↗]() - [Book a visit ↗]() ## Another useful thing to know. [All DIY tips ↗]() ![Water comes up out of the washing machine standpipe. 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