Soft-fill cistern issue ?

Had te same problem. Fitted new valve.

Did te same. took it apart put it back together. It worked.

They are simply crap

?They all do that sir...? ;-)

Is it really over-filling or is it leaking past the flap valve? Both are common. We had one that would overfill periodically and no amount of disassembly, cleaning, checking for grit etc would fix it for any length of time. Turned out to be simpler to just replace the innards.

Tim

Having exactly the same bother. It has an annoying habit of doing this just as I (try to) settle into a relaxing bath.

There is an isolator on the pipe feeding it, turning the flow down a little seems to have helped.

I've had the flush leak - sometimes a speck of black mould seems to appear from somewhere.

This is definitely the filling valve ...

When it starts playing up, I turn the isolator before fiddling :)

But why ? Bearing in mind the classic ballcocks also leak over time ...

British toilets rely on a siphon to empty the cistern. They don't have a flap valve (as US cisterns do) - maybe to avoid the problem of a leaking flap valve causing a cistern to drain continuously into the toilet, using up water continuously to replace it.

I think they're creeping-in over here, e.g.

I fitted a flap-valve flush 14 years ago when I redid the bathroom. One neat feature (FSVO "neat") is not needing an external overflow.

Wake up Rip Van Winkle. Flap valves (in one form or another) have been in use in the UK for years.

Tim

Is the flap valve designed to leak into the cistern if the water level gets too high?

For toilets with overflows, why is it that historically the pipe always went outside the house, whereas now they can drain into the toilet bowl? Has some regulation changed? Or is it only flap valve cisterns that are allowed to have a conventional overflow which drains into the bowl; are siphon cisterns still required to overflow to outside?

Oh. Right. I've never seen one in any house that I've owned or stayed in. I'd though that they didn't met our building regs and water supply use regulations. Was that true at one time but maybe not any more? Or was there some other reason why flap is almost universal in the US whereas siphon was (until some time ago, evidently!) universal in the UK?

I suppose it's inevitable that if it's American it will become trendy over here - whether it's US vocabulary and pronunciation, screw-thread lightbulbs (*) and now flap-valve loos. I wonder how long our three-pin plugs will last before someone decides that we should replace them with either US or French/German plugs. And will our BT phone plugs eventually be replaced with RJ11 plugs? I've never had the tab break off a BT plug, but the ones on RJ11 (phone, modem) and RJ45 (Ethernet) break off at the slightest provocation.

(*) It was only a couple of years ago (maybe when I was going round Ikea) that I learned that mainland Europe uses screw-thread too: I'd always assumed until then that there was a clear 120V = screw; 240V = bayonet distinction to prevent a 120V bulb being accidentally used on a 220-240V supply.

I believe you have to be able to see that there is an overflow. Some 20 years ago (19 actually) I refitted daughter 2's flat which had no external wall to the bathroom. I discovered I could buy a short length of transparent pipe to fit to the overflow before it fed into the stack pipe.

I'm not sure the overflow requirement is linked to the flap valve. However, I agree the flap valve is a neat approach, far less hassle than the syphon. I retro fitted one to our family toilet may be 10 years back. From memory, it didn't incorporate an overflow change. (The bathroom has been changed since so I can't check.)

Normally bad design or you didn?t move things around properly.

Its difficult to do reliable and quiet.

Sticking valve limescale build up somewhere, grotty cheapo design? Brian

Yes but in the end they are all based around the turning off due to water level and the constant trickling ends up in limescale or hardening or crusting of any washers and so complete seals eventually get harder to achieve. I guess somebody could design an electronic version with a solenoid valve operated by a limit switch on the arm of a float, so no water is actually involved in the cutting off of its own flow. A nice job for a Schmidt trigger circuit and a relay.

Brian

A few years ago we were encouraged to call the Overflow a "Warning Pipe"