Most important of all - make sure you buy a WARM one!
They vary a lot. Some are specified as being warm-to-touch. There's nothing worse than the shock of sitting on a toilet seat which immediately sucks all the heat out of your bum.
Having just replaced two of them, I can tell you that it is well worth fixing the screw threads with some thread-lock where ever you can. The hinged do seem to be cheap, as noted by another poster, and they worked loose on one of mine. I quick undo-clean-threadlock-redo has sorted that out and now my thrones are sturdy once more.
've had one in place for some months and have been very pleased:
The hinges axis is stable (more like the continuous rood hinges, not at all like those two wibbly separate hinges that go everywhere then break).
The mating surface to the pan top and the rubber pads make for quite a stable fit. Ours has wandered just a tiny bit with loads of bum action. I'v had some where the bloody seat goes from side to side if so much as a moth sits down with the paper.
It may not be important to you, but the soft close does work well - we have kids so it is a mandatory requirement!
It's fairly easy to clean, even round the hinge and fitting area.
They are good, for sure - are we talking about the type that fall noiselessly all the way from the vertical? Not sure what happens when they get 'forced' to go down by people unfamiliar with them - doesn't that bugger them? That's certainly the impression I get (we have one in our en-suite so is only ever used by SWMBO and meself, both of whom are fully qualified, time-served soft-closers)
the instructions say not to, but we've done it a few times without issue. I suspect it just progressively weakens the damper mechanism - certainly doesn't break it. If you did it all the time, I expect they'd eventually cease to be soft close though.
I agree for 2 reasons. Many pans and cisterns are arranged that the typical seat becomes a knob crusher for stand-up duty, where most soft close seats will stay up, even when the geometry and placement of hinges say close. The second is you don't get that embarrassing crash of a seat once in a while!!
They aren't cheap though, I got mine on offer at Wickes.
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