Spent $80 on a cheap toilet flange repair kit and it failed within 3 months

My tenant called saying the toilet was rocking and there was water seeping onto the floor when they flushed. I went over, saw the flange was cracked, and grabbed one of those push-on plastic repair kits from the hardware store for 80 bucks. Figured it would hold. Three months later I get a call about water damage in the ceiling below. The repair had completely let go. Cost me $600 for a contractor to rip out drywall and replace everything. Has anyone else tried those kits and had them actually work, or am I better off just cutting out and replacing the whole flange with a metal one every time?

2 comments

2 Comments

tarag2821d agoTop Commenter

Not sure how you got $80 for a push-on plastic kit, those are usually like $20 at Home Depot. But yeah, I wouldn't trust a plastic flange repair for anything but a temporary fix. That rocking toilet probably meant the subfloor was already wet or soft, so that kit never really had a solid base to grip onto. You might have gotten away with just tightening the bolts and adding a new wax ring if the rocking was minor. But once they start shifting and leaking, it's usually the whole mess underneath that needs attention.

rodriguez.diana21d ago

$80 does sound steep, but I've seen the flange repair kits at Ace Hardware hit $60 for the brass ones with the stainless ring, so maybe it was a markup. The real question nobody's asking is if that rocking was caused by a toilet with a leaky gasket that rotted the subfloor years ago, not just the flange.

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