Weird Fill Vale

[The Medway Handyman]

Did a job today, toilet overflow. One of those boxed in & tiled over cisterns - very pretty but a bugger to work on.

Came across the weirdest fill valve I've ever seen.

thread wasn't 3/4 BSP, more like 1/2". Hole in the plastic cistern was too small to take the 3/4" spigot on the replacement fill valve.

Float on the end was just a piece of polystyrene. No diaphragm, just a rubber pad - which had perished.

Couple of good points, very easy to adjust fill level, nice big thumb wheel & easy to adjust arm length.

I suspect it was......

French!

Another odd thing, the supply to the WC & H&C of the basin were 10mm plastic, same stuff used on microbore central heating. Never seen that before either. Flow rate didn't seem to bad.

[Tim W]

The Medway Handyman wibbled on Monday 16 November 2009 19:58

Pretty sure my torbeck is 1/2" thread...

Can't help with the weird valve - but now you know that you could replace it with something else...

eg

(Item 18336)

[Steve Walker]

Certainly looks similar to a french valve that I recently took apart to remove grit while I was on holiday recently (I thought I'd better put it right, as it we'd borrowed the place from my parents for free!)

Don't know about plastic, but it's quite common for french toilets to be fed from 10mm copper.

SteveW

[YAPH]

I think you mean it was 3/8" rather than the usual 1/2" - some greasy forriners seem to use the smaller diameter.

ISTR having a similar problem a while back, but being able to bodg^H^H^Hadapt a connection to a Torbeck within the cistern itself.

Do you mean it was a diaphragm type but one in which the diaphragm was a flat rubber disk rather than the sort with sort of circular ripples we're used to? Or was it like the plain rubber disc on a piston type valve? Although they pretty much come down to the same thing: a float-operated lever pushing a bit of rubber up against a nozzle through which water enters the valve (or not).

Did it smell of garlic, or was there a frog in the cistern? ;-)

Definitely forrin!

[The Medway Handyman]

Prolly, yes. I had to enlarge the hole somewhat to get a'proper' thread to fit.

The latter.

There was a faint wiff of garlic, yes.

Indeed. It has no place in Medway :-)

[John Rumm]

Twas how I felt on Saturday night, some toad decided the close the M2 on the way back toward the M25. Ended up sat in a queue through Rochester for an hour and a half just to get over the ironwork bridge!

[The Medway Handyman]

So did I! I'd been to my daughters in Maidstone to change a radiator & was coming back around 6:30, so I sat in the very same queue.

The M2 bridge is blowy at the best of times, Saturday a Ford Focus was flipped over by the wind & a Nissan 4x4 blown across 4 lanes - good idea to close it.

[John Rumm]

Not sure exactly what time I was there, but it must have been similar. I think I left Margate about 5:45 ish. Ttrangely enough, the thought did occur to me to keep an eye out for your van. ;-)

Is that why they closed it? If anything it seemed more windy in the morning on the way out - I went over it outbound about 12:45 and was expecting it to be quite severe, but in reality it was not much worse that the rest of motorway. (The QEII bridge was open as well, which was in some ways more surprising).