water tank fill after water off for 3 days

Why is your toilet fed from the header tank, shouldn't it be fed from the mains? Or do you mean the toilet tank, ie the cistern? I keep two buckets of water standing in the bath to fill up the cistern for solids flushing. (And two 4-litre milk bottles of drinking water in the kitchen cupboard.)

JGH

In message , jgharston writes

I was always under the impression that all toilet cisterns had to be fed indirectly (ie from a header tank). This was to prevent germs from crawling out of the toilet bowl, up into cistern, through the ball-c*ck and into the mains water supply.

However, I recently had an extension built, which included a downstairs toilet. Apparently, no such restriction exists. Did it ever, or was this yet another figment of my imagination?

Nope - not for many years. However, this explains why you no longer get "silencers" for ballcocks, to prevent backflow.

I always thought that toilets had to be fed from the mains, along with the kitchen tap, at least this was the impression in all the leaflets our local council gave out at information events and I've often gone to complicated extents to ensure this.

JGH

We have a silencer on a Torbeck valve - a collapsible polythene tube that dips below water level. Collapses if backflow is imminent.

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten them. I had in mind the screw-in stiff plastic tube sort.

Certainly hasn't been the case when we've had a tank: only the kitchen cold tap has been direct mains fed. The link below says "[the] tank basically supplies all your water requirements other than fresh drinking water: usually basins, baths, toilets and showers":

who knows?

enough?

it is modern practice BUT a lot used to depend on convenience. If you are taking hot and cold feeds from a header tank to a bath via a HW tank, you tended NOT to have mains on the same run. So extend the cold to fill the cistern.

Remember the whole point of a header tank is/was to cover bad supply. So you ran everything off it. Except the kitchen tap which was The One You Drank Out Of.

Especially after your dad fished the rotting blackbird out of the header tank and explained that's why the upstairs water had gone brown....

Today we expect reliable supply, and so its more common to not have a header tank at all, or uses it really as a pressure reduction/volume increase system or simply because its a leftover from the 50's..

And that means taking mains cold, all over.

Is there any truth to the story that loft-tanks were mandated to ensure a supply of water in case of fiery invasion by Napoleon?

I always thought that one a bit spurious.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Skipweasel saying something like:

A bit of a gap in history, if it is so.

Mike