Would you take a dollar note and flush it down the drain? Well if your toilet has a leak that could be exactly what you are doing. Here is a simple test of how to check to see if your cistern is leaking.

Take some vegetable dye and pour it in your cistern before you go to bed, or ideally before your go away for a few days. You simply need to leave the toilet unflushed (and of course unused), for as long a period as possible. If when you come back to your toilet a while later, and you can see the stains of the vegetable dye down the inside of the toilet then you have a leak. This means that water is constantly trickling down your toilet which is BAD! This needs to be fixed right away because if you are on a water meter then you are flushing money down the drain, as well as unnecessarily increasing your water usage.

There are many resources on the net as to how you could fix your leaking cistern yourself or simply call your plumber when you have him (or her) round for something else.