Before you call anybody: most toilet problems are a $6 part and twenty minutes of your Saturday. We would rather say that plainly than sell you a service call you did not need. There are exactly two toilet repairs that genuinely want a plumber, and they are both about what is happening underneath the toilet rather than inside the tank.
Reliable.Work is a referral service, not a plumbing company. If it turns out you do need one, tell us what the toilet is doing and one vetted, licensed C-36 contractor covering Long Beach will get back to you.
The running toilet, which is a flapper, which is six dollars
A toilet that hisses, or refills itself every few minutes with nobody in the room, is leaking from the tank into the bowl. Nine times in ten the flapper has gone hard and stopped sealing. Take the lid off, look at the rubber flap at the bottom of the tank, and press it down with a finger. If the hiss stops, that is your part.
Shut the angle stop behind the toilet, flush to drain the tank, unclip the old flapper, clip the new one on. There is no glue and there are no tools. A phantom-flushing toilet can waste more than 200 gallons a day, which you are paying the city for, so this is not a cosmetic fix.
If a new flapper does not stop it, the flush valve seat is pitted or the fill valve is stuck. A full tank rebuild kit runs about $20 and takes thirty minutes. That is still not a plumber.
What our water does to the inside of a tank
Long Beach water runs hard, roughly 10 to 15 grains per gallon depending on the seasonal blend, and hard water is why fill valves here foul faster than they do in soft-water cities. You will see white crust on the valve and a toilet that fills slowly or will not shut off cleanly. That is scale, not a defect.
One practical consequence: do not put an in-tank cleaning tablet in your toilet. The chlorinated pucks eat the flapper and the seals, which is precisely the part that was already going to fail, and they will do it faster. They are sold in every grocery store on Fourth Street and they are a bad buy.
The two repairs that do want a plumber
A toilet that rocks. If the bowl moves when you sit down, the wax ring under it is compressed or broken, and every flush is putting a little water and waste into the floor rather than the drain. On a raised-foundation bungalow in Carroll Park or Bluff Heights, that water has been going into the subfloor, possibly for years, and the flange the toilet bolts to may be rusted through. Do not fix a rocking toilet by tightening the bolts. Tightening the bolts cracks the china and does nothing about the flange.
Water appearing at the base after a flush. Same story, more urgent. Pull the toilet, replace the wax ring, inspect the flange, repair or replace the flange if it has corroded. On a slab home in Los Altos or El Dorado Park, a broken flange cast into the slab is a real job. On a raised foundation, it is usually straightforward. Either way this is not the moment for caulk.
What things cost
- Flapper: about $6. Fill valve: about $15. Full rebuild kit: about $20. All at any hardware store in the city.
- Plumber replacing a flapper or fill valve for you: $150 to $300, most of which is the trip.
- Pull and reset with a new wax ring: $200 to $400.
- Flange repair or replacement: $300 to $600, more if it is cast into a slab.
- Clearing a stubbornly clogged toilet with an auger: $150 to $300, though a $25 closet auger from the hardware store handles most of them.
- New toilet supplied and installed: $400 to $800 for a decent one.
When repairing is the wrong answer
If your toilet predates 1994, it is very likely a 3.5 gallon per flush model, and it is quietly costing you money on every flush. Paying a plumber $300 to rebuild the internals of a 1978 toilet is an odd way to spend $300. A modern 1.28 gpf unit costs $200 to $350 at retail, works better than the early low-flow toilets that gave the category a bad name, and it pays part of itself back on the water bill.
The other case is a cracked tank or bowl. There is no repair. Any product that claims otherwise is selling you a delay.
Questions
My toilet clogs constantly. Is it the toilet?
Maybe, if it is an early-1990s low-flow model, which were genuinely bad. But if more than one fixture in the house is slow, or if the tub gurgles when you flush, the toilet is innocent and you have a drain line problem. That is a different page and a different conversation. Gurgling is the tell people miss.
Do I need a permit?
No. Repairing or swapping a toilet is not permitted work in Long Beach.
There is a sewer smell but no visible water.
That is usually a failed wax ring letting sewer gas past the seal, and it is worth dealing with promptly, because the same gap is letting water into your floor. It can also be a dry trap in a rarely used bathroom, in which case run the tap for thirty seconds and see whether the smell goes away. Try the free thing first.
Related work
If the whole bathroom drains slowly, not just the toilet, read drain cleaning. If the toilet is overflowing right now, emergency plumbing covers what to shut off first. For a broader view of what plumbers charge here and why, see plumbing repair in Long Beach. Back to the Long Beach plumber overview, or browse all plumbing services.
Send your Long Beach toilet details
Tell us what it is doing: running, rocking, leaking at the base, or clogging. If the answer is a six-dollar flapper you can fit yourself, we will say so.