Pro Handyman Blog

At a customer’s house today, she was complaining of her toilet handle sticking as she would flush the toilet. I removed the toilet tank lid and the handle was not normal. From the outside, the handle looked like every other handle in a 10 mile radius, but on the inside of the tank, it was plastic and was bent towards the tank. So, when she would flush the toilet, the handle would scrape the inside of the tank and get caught in the full open position. This allowed the water to continually run down the drain and the tank would never refill unless she manually pushed the handle back into position. This naturally was a source of frustration to her.

There are a couple of solutions here. The first, and cheapest, is to modify the handle inside the tank. Since it was plastic, I picked up the weapon of choice (a hacksaw) and cut off the part that was rubbing on the tank. This shortened the lever, but left a few holes to choose from to reinstall the chain leading to the flapper. The lever was still long enough to be positioned over the flapper and so it worked naturally with little extra effort.

The other option was to replace the handle. Here is an article on a toilet repair on how to replace a toilet handle.