Toto THU147 Trip Lever failures

[Robert Snow]

I have three Toto Willingham toilets. One is in a bathroom that is more public and used by visitors and overnight guests. The trip lever has failed several times over the past 8 years. There is a stainless rod inside the mechanism that is bent into an L shape. The short leg pivots in a nylon hole. When the trip lever fails, this short leg pops out of the hole. It is possible to remove the chrome cover to reseat it, but eventually the nylon gets deformed and it pops out more easily until it cannot be fixed. The only way I can see this happening is if someone pulls the side mounted lever up past its working limit, with a fair amount of force. I keep a little slack in the chain and use the correct Korky 2022BP flapper. The handle hangs down vertically and as you begin to pull it forward the flapper begins to move after about 15 degrees of rotation. I have unscrewed the handle and repositioned it so that the trip lever does not begin to move up until about 45 degrees of movement. This seems to stop aggressive "handle yankers" from reaching the point where the rod pulls out of the hole in the nylon.

At first I replaced the lever. It is expensive because it comes with a porcelain and chrome handle that is screwed onto it. List $65, best price seems to be $40. If it came without the handle, it could be a lot cheaper. I have now taken both apart a few times to reseat the stainless rod. One lever mechanism is too worn to fix now.

 

[Terry]

A standard side mount handle may work too. In TOTO that would be the THU004

And some hardware stores carry these.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Robert Snow]

I am hoping that repositioning the handle eliminates the problem, because now someone would have to yank the handle above horizontal to reach the limit and pop out the internal rod. The toilet in the master bedroom gets a lot of use and that trip lever has never broken, nor has the one in the back which gets very little use. The Toto toilets have been great otherwise. I did replace the fill valves a few years back. The toilets came with the Voreto ones that had the screw adjustment and one started leaking out of the cap. I've used Korky Quiet Fill in the past and love the easy to change seal in the cap, so I replaced them with the blue Toto-specific Korky 528T valves with no ratio adjustment. I made the mistake of adjusting the water level to the Toto recommended 1/2" below the overflow and the bowls never filled to the correct height after a flush and performance suffered. Raising the level in the tank to 1/4" below the overflow fixed that problem. I use the blue flappers from Korky. They have never leaked, but they do sag after a while from the weight of the water in the tank and seem to require a little more lever travel for them to pop up. I see the Willingham now comes with a flush tower rather than a flapper. Would there be any advantage to switching to the tower when I need to replace the flappers again? Flappers are $9 and the lowest price I could find for the correct towers is $23. I see that replacement seals for tower valves are only about $4.

Before the Toto Willingham toilets, we had Kohler Rialto toilets from 1990 with 3.5 gallon flush and they were some of the worst toilets ever made. Terrible flush because of the extremely low tank.

 

[Robert Snow]

I am reviving this thread with new information. I recently purchased another trip lever. The plastic housing for the mechanism has been replaced with brass. Seems like it will hold up a lot better. Only downside is that the vertical movement of the lever is reduced.