Last summer, my family and I were on vacation when our water department came to take the monthly meter reading.  We received a cell phone call from the water department telling us that it looked like we had a massive water leak.  Apparently there’s a leak detector on our water meter and it was spinning like crazy.  Since we were out of town, the water department offered to turn off the water to the entire house until we returned.  

I called a friend who went to our house to check for leaks, but he didn’t find anything.  What was the problem?  When we got back from our trip and turned the water back on, I found the problem — a running toilet in our daughter’s bathroom.

Some sources I found said a running toilet can use 2 gallons of water per minute.  You can see that a toilet running for several days could use thousands of gallons of water per day.  The costs would easily add up to big money.

Bottom line, if “jiggling the handle” isn’t working for you, get that toilet fixed before it hits you in the wallet!

Photo credit:   Crawfishpie