I just removed the cistern for like the 6th or so time to inspect. The gummy stuff appears to adhere very well to both the ceramic and the foam. I would be quite surprised if the water were getting between them. I suspect the most likely theory now is water goes between the foam and the cistern and over top the foam. To test this, I guess I will cut out a paper ring and place that on top of the foam and see if part of the paper gets wet. If the paper gets wet, then I’m thinking I will wrap electrical tape around the cistern down spout to widen it a bit, to get a tighter fit in the foam ring, and maybe put 1 strand of jute (rope) under the electrical tape near the top. And if that fails I guess i will put some of the gummy stuff on the top of the foam, though that will make for a mess everytime the cistern needs to be removed.
The bolts use a plastic washer and plastic nuts that slide into plastic rails of the plastic cistern. It’s really flimsy. As I tighten the nuts, I can hear the cracking sound of the plastic washers cracking internally. I’ve reinforced them with a bit of thin sheet metal but whatever I do cannot rely on bolts to add much pressure. This is also why I kind of doubt a rubber flanged gasket working even if I could track one down.
But indeed using all gummy stuff would likely work (but messy!). I’ll try it if my next plan fails.
The plastic ‘bolts’ really suck. You can replace them with steel if you don’t need to take it apart again in a few months ( I would recommend against it though), stainless or brass would be my choice. Coating the threads with heavy waterproof grease helps in any case to prevent wicking.
I’m with you, I hate replacing something that should work. To me it’s not just the money but needless waste. I will spend time to keep things out of the land fill. It would be nice to shoot things sometimes but not really an option for me.
In US the most common type of seal is a wax ring. The wax deforms into an exact fit. But everything needs to be extremely rigid, any movement later will break the seal.
I’ve also used a rubber seal (once) with good results.
Wouldn’t grinding the ceramic remove the enamel coating? I would worry about your future seal not fitting snug against whatever surface you end up with.
If you have to replace it, there are so many things you can do with an old toilet. People dump them in the woods, then shoot at them with shotguns, shoot at them with rifles, shoot at them with pistols. Filling the tanks with ice makes a good beer cooler for backyard barbecues. They make classy planters for flowers (usually petunias) in your front yard. So many options…
I’ve seen those used between the toilet and the floor on US toilets. I didn’t know they also used them between the cistern and bowl. That might work here but finding one locally seems unlikely but I’ll have to look anyway.
But everything needs to be extremely rigid, any movement later will break the seal.
Well, cistern is plastic and flimsy so maybe it wouldn’t work. I’m also thinking the hard rubber gaskets might only work well for a heavy ceramic cistern.
I appreciate all the recycling tips. People around here just use them to decorate street corners without cleaning them up first. I never see them getting dumped, so I guess the city porcelain beautification project must be happening late at night.
One practical use I might consider is for the parking competition. Sometimes people try to reserve street parking by putting junk on the street in front of their house until they need to park. A heavy old ceramic toilet might work well for that as probably no one else would want to touch it to take a parking spot.
Really I don’t see much of a point for one. Crappy house with crappy plumbing, but they aren’t going to buy a fancy valve to make the problems somewhat manageable.
Tankless water heaters are becoming more popular. The thermostatic valve would save you from turning the standard water mixer a little hotter when you run out of room temp cold water in the lines and the cold water from outside reaches the shower. Otherwise, you are always being supplied constant temperature water.
I feel like most people that would be willing to pay extra for a thermostatic valve would pay extra to have an oversized water heater, or even tankless.
It’s bizarre that thermostatic mixers are costly in the US. I can get a new one as cheap as €25 if I shop out the sales, or probably €10 2nd hand.
Tankless water heaters are really lagging as well in the US, and absurdly costly. I’m sure that will get corrected eventually. But in Europe tankless boilers are the norm and used in combination with thermostatic mixers. The lack of tank causes a delay in hot water because it’s less instant than a pre-heated tank. The heating element takes time to fire and reach a high temp. So you are even more tempted to open the hot valve 100% until the hot water comes, which means you have to diligently readjust the valve to avoid scalding.
The luxury fix to that delay is to have a 3rd pipe that cycles the (cold) hot water line to keep it hot in the pipes. This seems quite wasteful and complex so I wouldn’t want to install that.
Even a couple of dollars more for a contractor is a lot when a thermostatic valve doesn’t add any value.
You can get inexpensive tankless water heaters.
You want to open the hot valve 100% until the hot water comes because it conserves water. You want to clear out the hot water line as fast as possible. Turning it to 70% just takes longer to heat up and you’re just dumping cold water out for no reason.
You want to open the hot valve 100% until the hot water comes because it conserves water. You want to clear out the hot water line as fast as possible. Turning it to 70% just takes longer to heat up and you’re just dumping cold water out for no reason.
This is precisely what a thermostatic valve gives you. I don’t think you know how a thermostatic valve works. If the thermostat on the mixer bar is set at 38°C and you turn on the pressure control when the water in the hot line is cold, a thermostatic valve opens the hot 100% immediately and when the hot water arrives at the fixture it automatically adjusts. What you say about starting 70% open is exactly the problem you have when /not/ using a thermostatic valve, like the pressure balance valves that are common in the US.
(edit) also consider how tankless heaters have a minimum threshold for turning on. If you open the hot valve just a little, the heater will not be triggered. It must be open enough to trip the flow switch. It can be tricky to open the valve just enough to trigger the heat. A thermostatic mixer valve solves that.
Even a couple of dollars more for a contractor is a lot when a thermostatic valve doesn’t add any value.
I don’t think you saw the pic I posted of the cheap thermostatic mixer bar. Those can be installed by anyone because they are external. You just turn two union nuts until hand-tight then give ¾ turn extra with a wrench.
Yeah, high end installations have been using them for years. You won’t find them in the big-box stores. I looked into all that when I redid my showers and decided to just go with Delta “Monitor” mixers. It worked pretty well with the old tank heater and it’s indistinguishable from a thermostatic now that I have an on-demand water heater. As a bonus, the Monitor valve is interchangeable with a regular mixer valve in case I’m broke when it fails and need to buy a cheap mixer valve.
I think the Monitor brand uses wax like you described in a comment but they don’t call them thermostatic, probably to differentiate them from their actual bimetal products.
I have not seen that in the US and didn’t know it existed, but I have not really looked anywhere other than the usual home Depot or Lowe’s, so I don’t know what new home designers are doing. We just installed an electronic version that has temp, volume, and wand vs overhead switch controls and presets on a wall mount thing. Of course it comes with an app, but we just use the controller on the wall. Maybe not as dependable as a mechanical control, but works fine so far.
Most controls I see in the US, like in houses and hotels, are all-in-one type things where you basically have to have max volume to get hot water. Usually inside the control you can set a max temp that limits the percent hot water in the mix. Some have separate volume and temp controls, but I don’t know if they’re doing anything fancy like you describe; and a few old homes have separate hot and cold knobs, but that’s rare.
By far, the biggest con to installing a thermostatic shower valve is the cost. These valves tend to be at least twice as expensive, if not many times more, as pressure-balance valves.
Another disadvantage is the trim that accompanies this type of valve because it has two handles. These can be trickier to install with simple plumbing upgrades because they use a wall-mounted plate behind the handles. They tend to come in contemporary designs, although it is possible to find models that work with more traditional bathroom decor.”
The thermostatic mixers can get as cheap as €25. Though I think the cheap ones have a degree of slippage, whereby mid-shower I have to increase temp. I don’t know if that’s because it lost track of my setting, or if I adjusted to the temp physiologically and need hotter water to psychologically feel the same level of heat.
What kind of bothers me about the pressure balance design is you cannot tell from the pics if it’s really pressure balanced. I think the one handle style goes back decades, and originally did not maintain a balance. You have a joystick of sorts but if the pressure on one pipe changes you don’t know if it internally balances to maintain the ratio. So you have to read the product description and trust it.
These days most usa bathroom fixture I’m familiar with have a single temperature control that you set and it keeps the temperature steady at the set temperature even if the water pressure varies. Is that what you are wondering about?
Yeah, kind of. I’m glad to hear they have that capability. But note that there are some non-thermostatic designs that come close to achieving the same effect. Those have a memory of sorts, where they know you want X volume of hot water and Y volume of cold water. Then if the pressure in one drops or increases, the valve will adjust the other line ensure the hot and cold have the same ratio regardless.
That’s pretty good. But it assumes the hot water and cold water are each at constant temps. So imagine if you get to near the end of a hot water tank supply, the hot water will gradually become colder. In that case, a thermostatic valve will open the hot even more to chase the temp you want. Whereas the pressure balance style will not. Perhaps more importantly, the pressure balance style does not counter the fact that the hot line will be initially cold since the hot water cooled down while sitting in the pipe. So you have to fiddle with readjustments until the hot pipe is maxed out.
You have two controls, 1 for temp and one for pressure (instead of the traditional hot and cold with independent pressure controls on each). The temp knob has a stop in one position as you turn it, which gives 38°C water. The cheaper models are external and use a wax cylinder inside:
Wax expands as it gets warm. So when you first add pressure, internally the hot water valve is 100% open. Then as the water gets hotter at the valve, it closes and starts letting cold water in to retain the temp you select. It reacts quite fast too, so even if you have screaming hot water arrive at the fixture it’s quick enough to protect you from scalding. You set it and forget it. If someone else in the house flushes a toilet or runs a washer or dishwasher, thus causing the cold water to lose pressure, the thermostatic fixture will automatically adjust to maintain the temp.
The pricier ones are internal, which means all the complex valves are buried in the wall. And instead of wax they use a bi-metallic mechanism (which exploits the fact that a couple diferent metals bend differently with temp, or something like that). They look like this:
I think that has 2 pressure knobs, one for rainfall and one for the wand.
Whole external kits with rainfall and wand start at €100. If you just want the mixer bar and wand, it can be as cheap as €25. The internal kits start at around €500. I like the external ones not just because they are cheaper, but the plumbing is simple. You just need to have hot and cold threaded ½" pipes sticking out of the wall 15cm apart, which the fixture can screw onto.
I appreciate the suggestion but that luxury option sounds way more complicated. Adding a thermostatic mixer under the sink needs no pump or electrical wiring, and does not need a third water pipe to go from the faucet back to the boiler. It’s just plumbing under the sink. And in my case, I happen to have spare thermostatic shower mixers so I would just be buying a couple fittings.
I would perhaps even sooner put a small electric tankless water heater under the sink, which would require just one water pipe rather than 3.
I think there’s even a compromise where an electric insti-heat gadget can be plugged into the hot water line to give instant hot water, which I assume shuts off when the hot water actually comes.
When this happened to us - water dripping from the shower head - the fix was to replace the cartridge. It’s a part behind the shower knob; I don’t know what the purpose of the cartridge is, but I think it’s what they call the valve on a single-control shower; we got that replaced and it fixed it. The other thing I’d suspect is the valves themselves, if you have separate hot/cold controls. We had a valve simply stop closing completely on our dishwasher intake. I replaced that myself, but that was in an open space.
That’s a different kind of leak. A leaky valve isn’t my issue. But indeed it is nice to have replaceable cartridges so when a valve goes bad it does not require digging up the wall and replumbing.
OK - I was only referencing where you said you also had a persistent drip from the shower (faucet?) head. That’s almost certainly a valve issue. Pipes leaking is a different, non-valve issue, I agree.
I’m afraid you misunderstood. The leak in all scenarios is in the same place - water enters a room two rooms over from the bathroom. It’s unclear whether it’s seeping in around the showerpan or walls.
Just coming to say this. Our hot water heater was turned up too high so the hot water melted the plastic cartridge over time and then it leaks and makes the hot cold combination incorrect.
That’s hard to imagine. I would expect the plastic parts to withstand near boiling temps. The temp should drop some along the route. Often the the problem is people have their hot water tanks too low (to save energy), and then bacteria lives in the tank. So ideally the tank should be out of survivable range of most bacteria, and then showers should have a thermostatic mixer to prevent scalding. OTOH, if it’s a tankless boiler, you can probably get away with lower temps. So I would be tempted to conclude the cartridge you had was bad quality.
You may want to call a tile setter or kitchen and bath remodeler. Tile setters build concrete (mud pans) and install fiberglass pans. Remodelers often install fiberglass pans. Either trade should kinda specialize in this. Plumbers only care if pipes are leaking not if water is penetrating walls. Also fiberglass pans are supposed to be set in concrete (mud set) so they dont flex and leak. Good luck.
It should be fine at 55 rh, do not drink that water, it is full of dust, spores, bacteria, and has leached the plastic, metals, and paints from the dehumidifier
homeimprovement
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.