The new toilet's crap.

You may recall that I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago that we'd finally replaced our dodgy old toilet cistern with a brand new one, and how it had changed our life. The old one would run constantly, wouldn't flush, wash old, yellow-y and just generally crappy, so to speak. When we put the new one in, there was much rejoicing. It flushed, and then stopped flushing. It didn't leak or run constantly. It was a 2m x 2m box of heaven on earth.

So imagine my disgust when the new toilet started to run into the bowl. Not much at first, but eventually getting up to an audible trickle at night times. I thought we just fixed that? And thanks to the very old and perished rubber coupling where the cistern meets the pan (that I didn't replace with the new cistern, but knew at the time that I should), every time you flush, you get a couple of drips of (thankfully) fresh water trickle out the back, as the rubber has cracked.

As annoying as that was, I refused to look at it. It was a brand new toilet, it could bloody well fix itself for all I cared. It had been doing that for about 2 weeks, until...

...

... we came out yesterday morning, to find the toilet room flooded out. Not only was it now running into the cistern constantly (again), it had developed an external leak somehow, and was dripping water out onto the floor. It hadn't been doing it the day before, so something must have let go over night.

So we turned off the water, flushed it all dry, mopped up the water as best we could, and left for work. Last night, I pulled it all apart again, and think I've found the problem.

You see, when I put the new cistern on the wall, it's mounting points were wider than the old cistern. No worries - I could measure how much wider it was, so I simply centered the new cistern against the old one (so the outlet lined up nicely), and mounted it there. The issue, however, is that the old cistern was never centered on the wall. It was slightly offset - so the new one was also offset exactly the same amount.

So last night I re-measured everything, and centred the cistern on the wall. I previously had checked that the bowl was centered in the room (it was), so with everything centered and measured, it should all line up, and there should be no twisting forces applied to any of the joins. Therefore, seals should be able to seal, joins can join, and water should stay inside.

Certainly with the cistern centered on the wall, the toilet seat lines up a lot better, and isn't needing to be jammed in one particular spot any more.

But what I had failed to notice when doing my measuring was that whilst the bowl itself was centered in the room, it wasn't square. It's set on an angle. Which is why the old cistern was offset slightly - the flush outlet tub from the cistern needs to come out from the wall at an angle - not at 90-degrees. So basically now the cistern doesn't line up with the inlet to the bowl, because some dodgy Fred-in-a-shed home handyman plumber couldn't be bothered to get the bloody toilet bowl centred and square before bolting it to the concrete, and (here's the kicker) then tiling around it.

So I don't know what to do now. I've put it all back together with the cistern in the new (centred) spot, and it's not leaking externally, which is nice. It's not running internally either at the moment, but I expect that to develop like it did last time. I'm going to need to replace the rubber coupling sooner rather than later, but short of replacing the pan and then re-tiling the toilet area, I'm not sure what the next step actually is.

Bummer, eh?