I had the lid off the toilet tank the other day (to untangle the chain), and for the first time in my years of owning that toilet noticed that there was a float in there that apparently did nothing useful. I’m not talking about the float that controls the water supply - that one is easy to understand. This is another float, ring-shaped, that fits around the overflow pipe. When the toilet is flushed, and the water level in the tank goes down, this float falls down and hits the flapper, causing it to close prematurely, resulting in a weak flush.
It isn’t attached to anything else; it seems like its sole purpose is to interfere with the proper flushing of the toilet. So, as an experiment, I held onto the float and flushed the toilet to see what would happen. It was like having a brand new toilet! For the first time, that toilet flushed the way a toilet is supposed to! So I used a piece of string to permanently defeat that float and now I no longer have to flush three times to clear the bowl. Also, there is much less handle-jiggling required now.
So, anybody know what the actual purpose of that part is? I have tried toiletology.com and a few other toilet-related websites, but none of them mention that part. Could it be some kind of misguided water conservation measure?
You don’t mention the brand of fixture, but I’ll wager that it’s one of the many methods of meeting the 1.6 GPF regulation enacted by the toilet manufacturers whose R & D budget isn’t very large.
Like tearing off mattress tags and duping CDs, etc., defeating that device is a no-no, but I won’t dime on you.
The brand appears to be “URC”. I couldn’t find much about them with Google. I don’t think we have that 1.6 gallon regulation in Canada, but I could be wrong.
That’s one of the cheapo brands, as I feared. At least it’s not Gerber-they’re worse. Those companies produced some terribly engineered pieces of shite just to meet the 1.6 GPF regulations, which were also awful-in essence, the fixture couldn’t use more than 1.6 GPF, it didn’t have to effectively remove the waste, though-but that’s another rant.
If you’d like to fix your toilet and save water, try installing a Fluidmaster Bulls-Eye Adjust-A-Flush flapper.
My toilet may use the same mechanism. Instead of permanently defeating the mechanism, you can just hold the lever after flushing to get a giant flush when you need it, and flush regularly for a less-critical flush.
