Christmas Plumbing

It’s Christmas Eve 2021 and all the usual frenetic activity is occurring with a few extra ones thrown in for good measure.  Our house is being thoroughly cleaned unlike any of the half-hearted efforts I’d made earlier this year. This one is the real deal but the starting point is far from encouraging. I took a walk around the two floors only to find that rooms were piled high with cases, beds lay strewn with clothes, bags occupied the hall and the cloakroom was filled with wrong-season attire.

So this week has been one of rolling cleaning, securing base camp in the kitchen and then climbing to Everest, over the next couple of days. I arrived in the second-floor bathroom on Wednesday. I dropped to my knees and cleaned the floor with a J-cloth and a bucket of warm water and stared thoughtfully at the toilet. Porcelain and white, it looked ordinary enough but this loo had history. The heavy toilet seat and lid had crashed down on my hand last month and had left a black bruise that was gradually working its way out of the nail. I approached it today with new respect and decided to remove its lethal seat and lid and replace them with lighter plastic versions. With a seven and five-year-old visiting soon I had to plan for the worst-case scenario which could be on the lines of child number one enticing child number two to look inside the toilet bowl whilst pulling down the seat and lid on the top of the exposed head.

You think not? Anyone who has had sons will realise they act on impulse and never consider consequences.

Anyway, with the first task completed quickly, I thought I had time to tackle the small matter of the toilet cistern. It was re-filling very, very, very slowly after a flush. How slow is very, very, very slowly slow? About seven hours. I had a trick to shorten the wait which involved running the basin tap and refilling the toilet cistern with bottles of water but I had no intention of letting my grandchildren in on that ploy.  No, maybe I could fix the problem that had dogged this toilet for more than a decade?  I was feeling lucky.

My confidence had been boosted by the praise still ringing in my ears from the shower job I’d completed so cautiously I removed the cistern lid and surveyed the innards. It was one of those that contained a small deep lake of water with an orange plastic ball bobbing about on the water’s surface. The ball was attached to a long plastic arm that screwed into an inlet pipe and shut a valve somewhere in the cistern when enough water had been received.

Can I preface this next piece by saying that I have the memory of a goldfish? It’s all I can think of to explain why I ever considered attempting jobs around the house. Between you and me, I believe I subconsciously erase all memories of failed previous repair assignments.  Wiping the slate clean emboldens me to take on challenges I was never born to attempt. Don’t believe your parents when they say to you, when you are a child, that you can do anything. Take it from me at the other end of life’s piece of string, it’s not true.

I’m sure you have little or no knowledge of the working of toilet cistern and I have no technical understanding to properly explain it to you but in layman’s terms I had twiddled with the plastic screw in the past, to limited success it has to be said. I used the basic plumbing principle of the screw turning inwards -water flow decreases, the screw turning outwards – water flow increases. With this rudimentary knowledge, I set about my task with blind optimism. After thirty minutes of fine-tuning, I concluded that my screwing was having zero effect, which I felt was unusual, as I had a vague recollection of achieving some change in the flow of water in the past. Nope, not this time. The water still dripped painfully slowly into the cistern.

I took a chance and unscrewed and removed the orange ballcock.  Now, though nothing prevented the water from flowing out of the open-ended pipe, no water came.  I peered into the darkened pipe but could see nothing. The blockage must be further back within the inlet pipe, I reasoned. I was now venturing into new territory and probably should have turned back but I still felt the warm glow of confidence, a rare phenomenon that made me feel good about myself.  Today I could do more than I ever had before.

Why? I should have asked myself. Why such omnipresent optimism? Even now I struggle to answer that one.  Honestly, I believe I was filled with some illogical, irrational belief that I was going to succeed. That I’d solve the problem that had dogged this toilet for fifteen years. Why? Anyway, the dye was cast and I went to work on the cistern possibly going where no man had been before……

I visited the kitchen and returned to the toilet with a long thin pointy wooden stick. Nervously i prodded its pointy end into the open inlet pipe. After a few centimetres of free forward motion, I pushed against something. I felt an initial resistance, like a wall but then increasing my power I pushed on through. Within seconds a powerful jet of water shot out of the open pipe catching me completely by surprise! It bounced off my hands and splintered into multiple streams of water which sprayed the wall, the floor, me and even the light fitting. From the calm, moments earlier, I was plunged into a violent battle to contain the high-pressure freezing cold water. I fought to refit the ballcock attachment and forced it forward into a position where I could attempt to screw it back to the inlet pipe. Twice I pressed forward and twice it failed to gain a grip on the pipe. At times I despaired that it could be done. Was I to screw clockwise or anti-clockwise? Nothing worked in either direction and I was now standing in an ever-increasing pool of water. I must have pressed the attachment crookedly onto the face of the inlet pipe. I tried one last time and got a turn of the screw and it tightened on the inlet pipe. The blast of water was no more but the redirected water now came pumping out of an overflow pipe that also fed into the cistern.  I pulled the handle on the toilet and released a torrent of water into the bowl emptying the cistern. However, oh too quickly the cistern began filling again. Before long the overflow pipe was pumping water in too. I’d got the water I’d sought but now it took less than two minutes to refill and it never stopped filling. I despaired at the waste of water but at least it was contained in the unit and not flooding the bathroom.

An hour into the battle and I involved my wife in the sorry affair. She hadn’t much time to spare so she stood by the bathroom door arms crossed and balanced the facts: assisting a man fighting a losing battle with a faulty toilet cistern, a battle with no end in sight versus the time-critical cooking, bed laying, hall hovering, present wrapping, decorating et all that was needed before our visitors arrived in two hours.

I believe I got a fair hearing. She made some valid points, the main one being “ring a plumber, you cannot solve this problem”. At least we agreed on something, well two things. So I rang a plumber and then another but given the week that it was neither could assist before Christmas.

So the moral of this sorry tale is to never assume anything when it comes to plumbing, least of all, the extent of your own knowledge. If you haven’t managed to fix it in fifteen years and you haven’t had a brain transplant during that time leave it to the experts. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.