Don’t tell my wife, please.
Her toilet as been acting up for years. It just wouldn’t flush things down as well as mine does. My son’s toilet developed the same problem. It didn’t even do a good job with piss. The water would just swirl around in the bowl, Keeping about the same height, not being siphoned down. So I’ve run two containers of drain clearing chemical down those toilets. One pure-D chemicals, the other a biological product full of bacteria. Didn’t do squat. I was on the roof yesterday, making sure the vents were clear, I ran a snake down both to make sure.
(I can hear all you out there chuckling to yourselves…Of course you know what’s going on.)
Anyway, I went and bought (up to $50 so far) a toilet bowl auger thing to clean out the drain. I also picked up a beeswax gasket in case I decided to pull the toilet and have a look. Anyway, I’m covered with pee-stinking water yesterday trying to get that damned snake over the bends in my son’s toilet. The snake turned around and came back out, nicking me. Flustered, I cut the water and flushed, holding the handle down to drain as much as pissible. I empty the rest of the tank and plunged most of the water in to bowl away. I remove the toilet, peeling up a few floor tiles in the process, and discover it’s perfectly clear. The drain pipe look great too. I poured a five gallon bucket of water down it and noted no slow down. So I glued the tiles back down, put the toilet back and recaulked it to the floor.
It didn’t fully fill the bowl when I turned the water on.
(quit that chortling, please)
It suddenly becomes blindingly fucking obvious, what’s wrong. I take the lid of the toilet, note the reservoir is only about a third full, turn the little knob and adjusted it so the water fills to the fill line.
Works like a champ. My wife’s toilet? Same thing.
There’s more.
I replaced a freeze-proof faucet(hose bibb, to others) that froze last winter, and apparently chose just the right length(down to the freaking millimeter no doubt) of copper pipe to form a unbelievable resonance circuit between that faucet and my toilet’s feed line. When you crack that faucet , There’s a terrific BANG BANG BANG BANG. Frequency of about 2 BPS (bangs per second). The noise is my toilet’s feed tap being thrust in and out of the wall as if it were getting buggered on the backside.
I have not attemped anything with this yet. I image I’ll buy a water hammer arrester, a copper union (because I’m sure I’ll fuck something up), a bunch of wrong-sized copper fittings, etc.; Crawl under my house over the A/C ducts; forget the flux, go back and get it. Forget my pipe cutter, cut the pipe, forget about taking along some bread, screw up sweat soldering, go to the hardware store to buy more fittings, and eventual discover that I’ve only changed the frequency of the hammering.
Not a project I’m looking forward to.