The Toilet in my master bathroom, after 25 years, started leaking underneath. I never had this problem before so had no idea what this involved.
I did a bunch of research on-line and learned (I thought) how to do this, that it most likely would be a bad seal with the wax ring. Pulling the toilet and replacing the wax ring didn't seem like it would be too tough of a job (assuming it wasn't worse than that, like a cracked flange or something), however I decided not to tackle this myself and instead pay a professional plumber to do it.
To make a long story short - and it gets more involved than just this, as far as things he did & said in response to questions I had which just did not seem correct - I think he did it wrong. That is, he did not remove any of the old wax ring from the toilet, he just put new bolts in the flange, put the new wax ring over the flange, and slapped the toilet onto that.
So now the toilet has basically 2 sets of wax rings squashed underneath, such that the wax is sticking out the sides (and spread God knows where all over underneath).
It looks like this (am adding an attachment below)...
I did try to ask him about this before he did it ("Aren't you supposed to scrape off all the old wax ring before you put the toilet onto the new ring???") but his answer (for most everything I asked) was "no I never do that, this is how it's done, you can't believe what you read on google")
Is it OK for me to leave it like this? Or do I really need to re-do this, taking off all the wax first then put a new ring on (again).
I'm not a plumber so maybe I'm wrong and it perfectly acceptable to leave the old gunky ring on there when putting a new one on. Everything I read on-line says to clean the old crap (pun intended) off first though.
On the plus side at least I don't see it leaking anymore.
Thanks for any answers/advice.
I did a bunch of research on-line and learned (I thought) how to do this, that it most likely would be a bad seal with the wax ring. Pulling the toilet and replacing the wax ring didn't seem like it would be too tough of a job (assuming it wasn't worse than that, like a cracked flange or something), however I decided not to tackle this myself and instead pay a professional plumber to do it.
To make a long story short - and it gets more involved than just this, as far as things he did & said in response to questions I had which just did not seem correct - I think he did it wrong. That is, he did not remove any of the old wax ring from the toilet, he just put new bolts in the flange, put the new wax ring over the flange, and slapped the toilet onto that.
So now the toilet has basically 2 sets of wax rings squashed underneath, such that the wax is sticking out the sides (and spread God knows where all over underneath).
It looks like this (am adding an attachment below)...
I did try to ask him about this before he did it ("Aren't you supposed to scrape off all the old wax ring before you put the toilet onto the new ring???") but his answer (for most everything I asked) was "no I never do that, this is how it's done, you can't believe what you read on google")
Is it OK for me to leave it like this? Or do I really need to re-do this, taking off all the wax first then put a new ring on (again).
I'm not a plumber so maybe I'm wrong and it perfectly acceptable to leave the old gunky ring on there when putting a new one on. Everything I read on-line says to clean the old crap (pun intended) off first though.
On the plus side at least I don't see it leaking anymore.
Thanks for any answers/advice.