Completely off my Roca

I can now say definitively that I am not a fan of Roca.  I've only done what they wanted - replace the complete inlet valve system with a brand new one - and it was honestly the most inconvenient and generally hard-to-complete job I've done in about 30 years.  It's not all Roca's fault, obviously - some of the inconvenience is because the downstairs loo is a narrow little room, and some more is due to the way the thing was installed by the house builders/plumbers.  Here's a picture which I should have taken at the beginning:

restricted access

It's impossible to see this view directly - you have to hold your phone upside down at floor level pointing upwards, and guess what it's pointing at, to get this.  And then straighten it up and crop it in GIMP (like Photoshop for Linux) to make it look nice for you, dear reader.  It shows the isolating valve attached directly to the white plastic tube of the inlet assembly, and right at the top you can just see a bit of the white plastic nut which holds the inlet assembly into the cistern.  For a sense of scale, the copper pipe is 15mm diameter, so you can see that the gaps around the isolating valve nut and the plastic nut are pretty small.

The monstrous crow's foot wrench, when it arrived, turned out to be just as shiny as the 50 quid Facom one, with nice bevelled edges to boot.  It is also seemingly proportioned for undoing the wheel nuts of tanks (quite unlike the dainty object in the picture in the advert) but it does actually fit in under the cistern (just), and it did eventually do the job of loosening the valve nut, one sixth of a turn at a time.  Of course, you can't just slide the spanner off and reposition it, you have to wheedle it off and coax it back on at funny angles to avoid all the obstacles.  And if your socket driver has a ratchet, it it guaranteed to ratchet when you didn't want it to, and make it impossible to achieve the right position, so that you have to ratchet round the rest of the 300 degrees - which you have to do in a different space altogether, and then find your way back to the nut somehow.

monstrous (but shiny)

This must all done while clasping the loo in a kneeling bear hug, with arms feeding around the sides. In this position you can actually touch the nut with one hand, but you can only hold the socket driver with the other one, so you can't apply any real torque. Alternatively you can lie on one shoulder, with elbows about the ears, down one side of the toilet.  In this position you can use two hands on the spanner, but it's not possible to either touch or see the nut you're trying to undo.  Of course you can't switch between the two while holding the  spanner on the nut, and you have to be wary at all times of letting the monstrous crow's foot spanner fall onto the delicate ceramic of the toilet itself.

Then there is the plastic nut which holds the assembly into the cistern, which, of course, is a different size.  I had entertained the fantasy that since it's a plastic nut, it wouldn't be very tight, and I'd be able to loosen it without a special spanner.  Sometimes I am unaccountably insane!  Of course I couldn't - and the access limitations are even more severe.

At this point it became obvious that a custom-built special tool was needed.  Fortunately, I was able to come up with this:

special tool #387

...which is a 26mm box spanner, chopped to bits with an angle grinder, and welded onto one of those "stretch" cylinder head bolts you have to replace every time you remove them.  I still don't really understand why they can't be reused.  And I certainly don't approve of throwing them away.  So, I keep some in a box, for those occasions you need an 8mm rod about 8 inches long with a flanged hex head on one end.  Like now.

In practice, this tool worked so well that I may have to make another one to use instead of the crow's foot wrench.  For Roca close-coupled loos, it's the dog's bollocks - and I can save the crow's foot wrench for loosening the wheel nuts of tanks, if any should come my way.

So here's the reason for all my efforts, once it had been successfully extracted:

cause of all known grief

It's meant to be white, but that's what happens if you feed it with muddy water for a few years. The little thing in front is a flow limiter, which normally lives in the bottom of the inlet pipe and looks like this close up (new one shown for clarity):

tiny little slots

The idea here is that if you have tons of mains water pressure, this thing limits the flow rate of the water by making it go through the tiny little slots you can see here. Or if you have muddy water and low water pressure, the little slots block up and the flow is limited to nothing at all, which is a great success for the flow limiter, but a bit of a failure for everyone else.  The correct solution (in this case) is just to throw out the flow limiter altogether, since it was never actually needed in the first place.  Which you could, in principle, do without removing the whole assembly from the cistern; but in practice you can't move the feed pipe out of the way, so you do have to take it all out. And thus you do need the special tool after all.  As if I needed any justification.

Armed with my special tool, the tank wheel nut spanner, and a lifetime's experience condensed into a few short hours of painful, noisy struggling, I threw the whole thing together again in a tenth of the time it took to dismantle it, successfully bringing the whole sorry Roca saga to an end, for now. 

Elsewhere on the estate, our efforts to keep the neighbourhood's 1,276 cats out of the back garden to give the birds a chance have taken a new turn.  My efforts to fortify the gate having proved inadequate, we have acquired a remote control animatronic snake, which I think might just do the trick.  It is modelled on a rearing cobra (with fangs out) and it can go forwards in a curve to left and right, and backwards in a random direction, and works quite happily on tarmac.  At the same time its eyes glow, and it makes an evil hissing noise.  All that remains is to fix it up with a PIR detector and a remote power supply and we're there.  It can hide under the camper van, overlooking the gate, and I'm pretty sure it will scare the living shit out of the cat from number 12, which seems to be the only one left in the race now.   The only problem is that we really need a surveillance camera and some sort of recording device to capture the triumphant moment when we finally get the upper hand.  Can it be done with an old mobile phone and a Raspberry Pi?  Hmmm....