Yesterday evening the downstairs toilet started being a bit temperamental about flushing, so I took a look in the cistern. Couldn't see a problem so went to bed. Problem reappeared in the morning, but the bright light of morning had clearly poked enough brain cells into life, as I remembered about the oblong plastic washers inside the siphon inside the cistern which perish from time to time. The last time being quite a few years ago, maybe as many as five.
Open the thing up to find that the washer, made that last time from a fertilizer bag, had broken in half. So initiate a search for something suitable with which to make a new one, with all the recyclable plastic we could find being either too thin or too thick. Settled for the lid of the plastic tub that our cheaper ice cream comes in (lids for dearer ice cream are much too thick); a bit stiff and brittle but maybe it will do. Cut something out and fit it and we seem, once again, to have a working flush. It was also an opportunity too good to miss to exercise my one and only 3/8 inch gouge (a sort of chisel, see http://www.toolsforworkingwood.com/store/dept/TBMS/item/EE-SG500.XX) in the kitchen. A bit blunt, having slacked off enough to put the thing away blunt, but it did.
However, despite this success, I was not altogether convinced that the new washer was going to last, so set of for the Wolseley down the Longmead, braving all the traffic piled up around the schools and around the road works in Temple and Hook Roads, to make it to the Wolseley where I was impressed to find that they did indeed sell spare washers and I could have 5 of them for £2.09p. With the added touch of being offered a cup of tea, for all the world as if I was a proper customer rather than an occasional. Perhaps they were impressed by my cycle helmet - unlike the neuro-surgeon who was knocking them in the DT last week.
I will report in due course whether siphon washers are indeed one size fits all.
In the mean time, so many brownie points that I am allowed a morning snooze in the garden.
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