Toilet training

Today I tried to fix our toilet cistern, which has been dribbling water into the bowl while refilling after flushing. It’s been doing this for a while, but has started to dribble longer and longer before the water flow stops. I don’t fancy paying a plumber $150 to fix something that I could probably do myself in 5 minutes… if I just knew how.

So I did some searching and found a few YouTube videos showing how to replace the outlet valve sealing washer. It seemed simple enough, so I removed the outlet valve portion and inspected the old washer. It actually looked fine – no wear evident at all. But I headed off to the hardware store to buy a replacement washer and installed that, turned the water back on, and tested it.

And it’s still dribbling the same way as before. But now with the lid off and observing what’s happening as I flush the toilet, I can see that the outlet valve wasn’t the problem in the first place. The problem is the inlet valve doesn’t turn off in a timely manner once the cistern is full. The water overflows into the pipe that drains into the bowl for several seconds, before the valve finally shuts off. So now I reckon what I need to do is replace the inlet valve.

I’ll try doing that tomorrow, if I have enough time.

I also worked a bit on fine tuning parts of my game scenario for tomorrow night’s roleplaying game that I’m running. And did a 2.5k run. And went out for lunch time walk with my wife and Scully. I tried fish & chips from a different shop near our favourite bakery this time, rather than get a pie. And it was really good – possibly better than the fish & chips I get from the nearer shop. Now whenever I want fish & chips I’m going to have to decide whether to get the good one from the nearby shop, or walk all the way over to the slightly better one…

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2 thoughts on “Toilet training”

  1. You may not need to replace the entire valve apparatus. I don’t know the mechanism for your machine, but if it has a floating thing that triggers the shutoff, you can just adjust the position of the float.

    On the other hand, replacing the entire valve apparatus gives you the opportunity to do any upgrades. I put “two-way” stuff in mine — lift the handle up, it only half-empties the tank into the bowl, more than suitable for flushing urine. Push the handle down, it fully drains the tank to wash away solids.

    Cheers,
    Bob P
    Sparks, NV

  2. Before you replace the inlet valve itself, I has something similar where the float (that detects the cistern is full) wasn’t adjusted correctly. Setting it to turn off slightly lower in the cistern cured the problem. In mine this was set by a small plastic screw which slips with time.

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