Lately our toilet’s cistern has been extremely slow to refill (say, on the order of 20 to 30 minutes). Some web searches suggest that this problem is often caused by a defective gasket or calcification at the inlet. In both cases the problem is supposedly easy to fix: remove the internal parts and soak them in a citric or acetic acid solution and/or replace the gasket. The problem is that in order to do this I first need to shut off the water to the toilet, but it’s not obvious to me how to do this. Can anyone help?
Every other toilet I’ve had has had a knob on the inlet pipe, either just outside or just inside the cistern, that you turn to shut off the water. But this one doesn’t.
Shutting off the water to the whole apartment is not an option, as that valve is behind a locked cabinet in the outer hallway. Only the building maintenance staff and the water company have the key and I doubt they’re going to trek all the way out here, during the pandemic lockdown, just so that we can spend a few hours decalcifying the toilet.
If the knob-looking thing at the end of the pipe that comes out of the wall (the part that projects beyond where the inlet pipe goes up to the tank) isn’t something that turns, then I think you’re screwed until you can get the main turned off.
The knob-looking thing does indeed turn, but only looser, not tighter. I can loosen it completely and take it off; it looks like it’s just a cap covering the joint. Here is a better photo of the pipe, with and without the cap on:
It’s too dark to see in the photo, but the cap seems to be covering some sort of slotted screw. Is it possible this is what I’m supposed to turn, with a screwdriver? Or will this end up removing the joint altogether, spraying water everywhere?
I think you’ve hit pay dirt. Slotted screwdriver turned clockwise should turn the water off (counter-clockwise should open the valve and you SHOULDN’T be able to screw it all the way out.)
I concur, clockwise will turn off the valve. You may want to put a wrench on the valve body to keep it from rotating while closing the valve, as the valve screw may be fairly tight from not being used for a ling time.
OK, turning the screw seems to have done the trick. It’s been almost an hour and no water has entered the cistern. Thanks to everyone for the tip. Now hopefully decalcifying the innards and replacing the gasket will fix the problem with the cistern.
Hint: Don’t touch that thing on a weekend or evening. And have your plumber on speed dial.
If this is an apartment, the building management will want to handle this, not you. If that valve fails and you get a flood that won’t be shut off for many minutes, be prepared for major problems.
Not here, where by law the tenant has sole responsibility for any plumbing outside the walls. But your points about not doing this on the weekend or in the evening, and having an emergency plumber ready to call, was a good one, and I probably should have followed that advice. Luckily nothing bad happened this time.
I’m in Vienna. Except for public housing (maybe 1/3 of all the housing in the city) and the odd privately owned high-rise block, most apartment buildings here are in fact low-rise condominiums, where the individual units are owned separately. We do live in such a condominium, but we are renting from the unit’s owner.
The basic rule, according to tenancy law, is that within the apartment unit, the tenant is responsible for maintaining everything outside the walls (including bathroom and kitchen fittings, kitchen appliances, etc.), and the landlord is responsible for maintaining everything inside the walls (internal plumbing and wiring). An exception is the furnace/boiler, where the tenant is responsible for conducting routine maintenance and the landlord is liable only for major repairs. The landlord has, of course, joint responsibility with the other unit owners for maintaining the common areas of the apartment building (hallways, garages, courtyards, stairwells), though this is normally delegated to a property management firm.
I think it’s since been established that we do—at least, there seem to be valves (however hidden) on the inlets of all the individual fittings. There’s just no access to the main valve for the whole apartment.
It could be that the water valves in the stairwell cabinets are locked with a standard key that is issued to all licensed plumbers. I’m not really sure but this wouldn’t surprise me.
I’ve been to many European countries and can attest that their plumbing fixtures seem a bit strange sometimes compared to what in the US is considered standard fixtures. I’d often jump into a hotel shower and wonder how to work the thing.
I hadn’t seen a shutoff valve like the one shown before but was glad you were able to get it to work without any issues.
Tell me about it! You may have seen my previous thread about the weird plumbing here—I learned how to get hot water out the faucet in the bathroom sink only a full year after having lived in the apartment. We’ve since replaced the faucet with a more standard lever apparatus.
In the US you can change out the toilet insides for pretty cheap. I don’t know about Vienna but it looks like “European side mount valves” are only 30$ US on Amazon.
I usually skip the BS and just change everything when I have problems.
I think it’s incredibly wasteful to treat everything as disposable instead of carrying out simple maintenance. In my case, all that was necessary was to soak the innards in vinegar for a couple hours; when I put them back, everything worked fine again. Toilet innards aren’t recyclable (at least not around here) and so I’m glad I didn’t contribute to world’s ever-growing mountain of non-biodegradable plastic trash. At any rate, the “BS” I endured was significantly less onerous than swapping everything for new parts, since I didn’t have to track down the parts in a physical or online store, and all I had to spend was €2 on a big bottle of vinegar (which I actually already had on hand).
