Plumbing the depths

Obviously one can't have a downstairs loo with attitude for long without giving some thought to fixing it.  Unfortunately I already have some experience with the loo cisterns in the house.  They are made by Roca, who like to think of themselves as an upmarket company, so they have taken it upon themselves to reinvent everything in their chosen field.  So although the cistern looks and works pretty much the same as everyone else's, all the bits are incompatible with "normal" ones.  Additionally, the assemblies inside are designed to be built in a factory, and never reopened.  It's so much less work to replace the whole unit, and throw the old one away!  So a slight dribble somewhere means swapping out the entire inlet or flush unit at a cost of about £25, instead of replacing a soft washer for 10p.

Needless to say, I don't intend to be constrained by the wasteful intention of this wanton business strategy.  I fully intend to refurbish my inlet valve assembly - but to be on the safe side, and minimise the downtime while I explore where no man has ventured before, I bought a new one anyway.  The one in the main bathroom sticks occasionally and needs a hearty whack to make it wake up, so hopefully I can rotate them round and keep a refurbished one in stock ready for the next trivial failure.

Whatever happens, I need to be able to remove the inlet valve assembly, which means draining the cistern and removing the inlet pipe from underneath.  To my great surprise, the house builders did actually fit an isolating valve under there, so the rest of the house can go about its business undisturbed while this happens. Hoorah!  But unfortunately, it also means that access to the pipe union is extremely constrained.  It's the bit with the writing on in this picture...

no room at the inlet

Plumbers use a special sort of spanner to solve this common problem - and I have one!

plumber's tap wrench

too floppy to contemplate

  Alas, mine is for imperial tap fittings, and doesn't fit 15mm pipe compression nuts.  In fact I couldn't find the right thing anywhere; the most common offering seems to be a sort of floppy self-adjusting thing that takes up a lot of space exactly where you don't have enough.  I actually have one of those as well, but it's so horrible to use, and generally unsatisfactory in every way that I didn't even try.

In general garage engineering, the tool of choice for such a challenge would be a crow's foot wrench, which is just an open-ended spanner with the handle sawn off and a square hole through it to take a socket extension. So I had a look at those on the world wide vending machine...

gobsmacked, actually

Wow! The top end of the market seems to be one made by Facom, and as you can see, it's very shiny and polished, which I suppose goes some way towards explaining the price; a truly vertiginous £51.95.

That's a bit more than I was expecting, to be honest.

No matter, I found one made by Kennedy for £5.99 Inc VAT  (Special Offer - was £6.99 14% off!) at the Zoro shop.

Obviously the shiny-ness isn't in the same league, and it doesn't feature subtle stress-relieving notches to protect the corners of your nuts (oo er!), but they promise that it's made of proper chrome-vanadium steel, and it's much more my sort of thing, price-wise.

more my sort of thing

Incidentally, neither picture actually shows a 24mm wrench.  The square hole is 3/8in in both cases, so the gap between the jaws in these pictures is somewhere between 11 and 15mm, I'd guess.  Or to put in another way, the pictures are about 100% wrong.

On top of that, the Kennedy one offers the following somewhat disturbing "technical drawing":

This doesn't even make sense on its own, let alone as a description of the article in the picture.  It's wrong in almost every conceivable way.

But... £5.99 Inc VAT, and who need a technical drawing anyway?

I'm still waiting for this to arrive, so that I can get at the cistern and fix the old unit (which probably just needs cleaning). Watch out for updates.




I'm getting a bit concerned that all my recent blog posts have been rants about the price of things.  Have my horizons been drawn so near?  No, of course not.  I'm also reading a fascinating book about consciousness from a neurobiological perspective, called "The Ego Tunnel - THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND AND THE MYTH OF THE SELF" (Thomas Metzinger), and I'm learning Italian on my phone, as well, which I think is surely deserving of a smug emoji, if only such a thing existed.  So I guess the unnecessary emphasis on value-for-money purchases must just be a consequence of poor editorial judgement.  Or maybe it's a indication of a generally cheeseparing attitude to life.  But if that's the case, I'd like to point out right now that of all the things I don't mind spending money on, cheese is definitely in the top three.

And I'm keeping quiet about the other two.

Incidentally, the bird feeder had a visitation from a squirrel the other day.  I spotted the little chap standing on the top, and he spotted me, and there was an impasse; then he decided that since I was indoors and he wasn't he would go for it anyway.  He went out along the horizontal part and then down the outside of the goldfinches' sunflower kernel feeder, leaving one back foot clutching to the ring it all hangs from.  He didn't seem to be able to get any sunflower seeds (not being equipped with the goldfinches' specialised beak) so he had a go at gnawing the plastic instead.  At this point I tried to get a picture, but before I could, he actually fell off, in a highly floundering, legs waving everywhere, most inelegant and highly amusing way!

I've never seen a squirrel fall of anything before, so I'm regarding it as a bit of a success for the design of the birdfeeder.  The squirrel seemed quite OK afterwards, and flounced off across the lawn with all the grace one normally expects from a squirrel.  I don't think he'll coming back though.  Too embarrassed, I reckon.