Things have gotten interesting in the Fallapartment again. In the downstairs bathroom we have a hangfire toilet. What is that? After you flush it and the water is gone, it sits there doing nothing for about 20 seconds before it starts to refill the tank. I have no idea why that happens, or even how I would design a toilet to make it do that. It flushes, and then there is nothing………… and then it starts to fill. Strange.
It doesn’t flush very well either, so one day I opened it up to see why this strange stuff is happening. I found out that our landlords have installed a “water saver” system in the tank, and that keeps the toilet from flushing. Since I am an artist, I decided to draw a diagram to illustrate how the insides of the toilet work. Here it is.
The “bucket” is the water saving device. It surrounds the flapper valve completely and it keeps most of the water from flowing down to the flapper valve to make the toilet flush. As you can see from the diagram, the piddly two inches of water left above the bucket doesn’t provide enough hydraulic persuasion to move the … uh… material… down the pipe. Hence, the toilet doesn’t flush. You could probably save even more water if you just stuffed a rag into the flapper valve hole without losing much more of the toilet function.
I would remove the device from the tank, except that I am a better artist than a plumber (well…. ok… marginally), and I don’t want to get involved in that.
So, we just flush it twice.
I have not figured out how the water saving device makes the toilet delay the filling of the tank for 20 seconds. That will take some further analysis. And, to make matters worse, the toilet has begun to hang on the flush end as well. We push down the lever, and the toilet sits there for 10 to 20 seconds… and then it flushes………. and then it sits there thinking about it for another 10 to 20 seconds…. and starts to fill up. I think it might be haunted.
The other plumbing news is that this:
started to leak this afternoon. That is the drain from the sink-that-won’t drain. After looking at it, we found that the screwy part (the thing with the knobs) had become unscrewed, and the pipe had fallen apart. We screwed it back together and it appears to work, but we left the bucket there just in case. The sink-that-won’t-drain now doesn’t drain just as well as it used to.
In case you are interested, the big, gray pipe comes in from the worst-dishwasher-in-the-world. I don’t think that the toilet comes into play here, but you never know what is going to happen.