Anyone know anything about toilets? (not a joke)?
Answers:
Unless there's water on the floor--you're fine. Work on pipes anywhere will not affect your toilet. An amount of water is kept in a trap (an S shaped channel inside your toilet) that sits there until enough water is dumped into the bowl (such as flushing the toilet) to push the water out the back and over the top of the trap. Then the weight of the water flowing down the drain pipe pulls the rest of the water out of the bowl--a siphon.
What happened was (is) that your toilet was allowing a very small amount of water to slowly fill the bowl--finally it reached a high enough level to cause it to flush, but there was no water flowing in to replace it. What you heard was the sound of air entering the drain and breaking the siphon, which ends the flush. Usually you don't hear it because water has rushed in and drowned out the sound. Take the lid of the tank and figure out what's catching. All new toilets need a little adjusting to work smoothly. It could be that the float (round plastic ball on a stick) is catching and not letting the fill valve shut off like it's supposed to. The chain or plastic strip that lifts the flapper could be catching on something and not letting the flapper close all the way, or it could be too short. Just watch it flush a few times and push/pull, whatever, you need to do to make all the moving parts move freely. Good luck.
(P.S. Get that handle fixed--you need to be able to shut off the water to your toilet, or any other fixture, in a hurry if something goes wrong, which it eventually will. A dozen things can happen, like a break in the connection between the valve and the toilet bowl for one. If you can't shut off the water, your bathroom will flood and you've just bought yourself a mold problem. Your only option would be to shut off the main, but then you're unexpectly without water until you get it fixed.)
Other answers:
see if you can find the book toilets for dummies
see if you can find the book toilets for dummies
Could be that the flapper (device inside the toilet that covers the drain) is worn out and needs to be replaced. If it is worn out then the water will go down the drain and the toilet will refill up over and over again.
first of all is the water leaking out any where if it is turn off the water on the side of the toilet. Otherwise it sounds like the flap in the toilet is not sealing or the handle did not return to the closed position. Did this happen after flushing the toilet? If so you may have twisted the handle to far, try twisting it clockwise.
it sounds like the toilet flushed without the force of the tank emptying into the bowl. for that to happen there could have been damage in the sewer line that created a vaccum. ask your neighbors if anything happened as well, if you are on public sewer. also you could call the sewer co. to find out what could have caused it.
best of luck