My brother-in-law (need I say more?) installed a new toilet over a ceramic floor. After a year, perhaps, the toilet wobbles a bit when you sit on it and, occasionally, you can hear porcerlain on ceramic grinding. I looked along the edge and noticed he used some nylon tile spacers, used for laying out the tile, underneath the toilet around the bottom edge.
I tried at first to tighten down the bolt on one side but it took more turns than I was comfortable making and it's still wobbling. I found some more of the tile spacers and put a couple under the same side but it's not a snug fit. So I'm not really sure how to proceed with this.
I could tighten the bolt some more but I'm worried I'll crack the toilet or, perhaps, the bolt actually came loose from the floor. I could also get some more spacers but I just don't feel that's the right thing to do. I'm not sure spacers under the toilet is the proper way to go about this in the first place.
Best Answer
The best approach here is (as @DMoore mentioned in the comment) to pull the toilet out and re-seat it. Not only will this let you see if the ring is cracked, it will let you get the tile spacers that it is currently shimmed with out from under the toilet. Also, once a toilet starts rocking it is only a matter of time before the wax ring get moved around enough that it will start to leak. You'll want to replace it to ensure that it hasn't already been compromised.
I'm guessing that this is more a problem with the shims themselves than it is with the ring (but again, you need to verify this). Most of the tile spacers that I've worked with when laying tile are made out of nylon, and they are slightly compressible. So, every time you've put weight on the toilet it has deformed them a tiny bit until they became flat enough to let the toilet rock. Once you get to this point, even if the rocking is imperceptible it lets them start shifting around underneath and it snowballs from there.
Once you get the toilet up and make sure that the ring and bolts are OK, re-seat it with proper shims. You'll want something that can support quite a bit of pressure without deforming to shim it - I use composite plastic shims: