Genius at Work

I am a genius! You know why? Because I fixed our toilet!

Our toilet, in recent weeks/months, has decided to let certain essential mechanisms cease functioning properly. Usually, after using our toilet, one would pull the little lever which is normally used to "flush" the toilet. This lever is connected, inside the upper tank of the toilet, to a chain, which is in turn connected to a rubber stopper which is keeping the water in the upper tank from going down into the bowl. Usually, pulling this lever causes the rubber stopper to rise, thus releasing the water held in the upper tank. As the water level in the tank goes down, a flotation device connected to a water flow mechanism also goes down. When it reaches a certain point, the flotation device triggers the water flow mechanism to begin to refill the upper tank of the toilet. Assumedly, by this point, all the water should be out of the tank, and the rubber stopper should have assumed its original position, thus blocking the new water from leaving the tank.

Our toilet was getting this process wrong in two ways. First, when one would pull the lever, the stopper would rise, but then, because the chain connecting the lever to the stopper is way too long, it would drop down below the stopper and get stuck, thus leaving a way for the new water entering the tank to escape. Normally, this would mean that our toilet would never stop trying to refill the upper tank after a given flush, that is until one fixed the chain and replaced the stopper. But our toilet wasn't even bothering to try to fill the upper tank with water after a flush. Upon investigation, it was decided that this was because the flotation device that was supposed to trigger the water flow mechanism was not doing so. It was not heavy enough to get itself down to the point at which water would start to flow back into the tank.

The result of these two separate but equally devastating mechanical failures was that, after each time one flushed our toilet, one would have to execute two extra maneuvers, an extra jiggle of the lever to release the trapped chain, as well as a slight push on the flotation device to trigger the water flow mechanism, in order to ensure that the toilet would be ready for its next use. Because of the constant need to access the flotation device inside the tank, the lid to the upper tank had been permanently removed, and we had been living in this primitive way for some time. Well, this morning I decided that enough was enough.

First I had to address the problem of the chain, which wasn't all that difficult. I just had to shorten the chain by changing which link of the chain was connected to the lever. In fact, this wasn't even really my idea, I think our landlord's plumber had performed this trick previously.

So that just left the mystery of the underweight flotation device. There was already a counterweight attached to the floater, which obviously wasn't doing its job, so my first idea was to get something else that was heavy but small that I could attach to that counterweight. But the problem was how to attach an object to the counterweight. If it was something I could get on a safety pin, that would work (safety pins were among the first things I found when searching the kitchen). But anything small and heavy would probably be solid metal, like coins or batteries (I did consider a 9 volt battery. Bad idea? Hard to say...). This got me thinking, what else do I know of that is heavy for its size? What besides metal can take up a relatively small space but weigh a substantial amount?

Water. Water is heavy! And yet, water floats! In water! I began to hatch a plan, a plan so simple and yet so elegant that it could not possibly fail. I found an empty (and clean) plastic yogurt cup. I stuck a large safety pin through the side. I put the safety pin around the metal bar connecting the counterweight to the flotation device in the upper tank of the toilet. At first glance, there's a yogurt cup in the toilet. But upon closer inspection, what is its function? When the tank fills with water, so does the cup. When you flush the toilet, the tank empties, but the cup does not, and the heavy water pulls down on the flotation device, enough to trigger the water flow mechanism. When the water in the tank begins to fill back up, the cup floats back up with it, allowing the flotation device to once again rise, and cut off the flow of water until the next flush.

So there you have it. Our toilet is once again functioning as it once did, in a consistent and flawless manner which will allow us to put the lid back on the tank, and go about our lives secure in the knowledge that each trip to the toilet will require only one push of a lever, and nothing more. You can't put a premium on that kind of peace of mind.

Oh, and I will now begin answering to "MacGyver."