Plumbing is not my Forte

Daily Ramble 86: Plumbing is not my Forte

Yesterday was not very much fun as far as gaming and comics go.  I got to spend most of my ‘free’ time dealing with plumbing issues.

Yeah, the Fluidmater 400A became my nemisis yesterday and I suppose it took me down. Sure, watching videos on YouTube for how to fix a whistling toilet seemed pretty straightforward, but when I got in there, things were another story.

I guess I don’t call myself the least handy handyman for no reason.  I’m really not very good at taking care of much, particularly toilets, but I figured I’d give it a try…’what could go wrong’?  I could always call a plumber if I broke anything real bad.

Draining the water from the tank was the easy part – at least I got most of it where I wanted and not on the floor.  And the mechanisms used to keep modern day toilets together are simple, hand tightened, things now so I didn’t need many tools.

Before I knew it, I had the fill valve off and out of the tank – woohoo!

Getting the new one in place wasn’t too much trouble either, but when I went to put the refill hose into the overfill pipe…of course the tube was too long.  Not a problem – I’ve got scissors.

With tube in place and everything sealed back up, I turned the water back on and…whala…everything worked!  Except the water kept running.  Now instead of a whisling toilet I had a running toilet – great!

It turns out I messed with the overflow pipe a bit too much and knocked it outta whack.  No problem…I’ll just jiggle it a bit and it’ll stop leaking…right.

Oops!  I don’t think the overflow pipe is supposed to detach.  Yup, I snapped the tube off the assembly and now I had another problem.

Back to YouTube.

UtOh…this was a bigger problem.  Now, not only did I have to remove the fill valve I just affixed, I also had to pull the enitre tank off the back of my toilet to install a new flush valve…AND…the Home Depot was closed so I couln’t purchase any of the parts until the morning.

So that’s how I rambled on Saturday.  I hope your adventures were more enjoyable.  Tune in tomorrow where I continue to try to claim victory over the toilet and his evil minions – the fevered flapper and the devious shank washer – and hopefully I can read a comic or play a video game for a bit too.