Being assigned to take care of this for my parents, I feel like I'm almost a homeowner.
Okay, now that the dishwasher, range, and fridge have been replaced, it's time to tackle the other household problem: plumbing. Namely, toilet and sink.
The sink faucets upstairs and downstairs actually work pretty well, but the one in the kitchen leaks seasonally. We've dealt with that by having a run off bucket sitting there that it used for watering plants. So far so good. Not exactly a priority, but why not look around anyways?
On the other hand, all three toilets in the house have problems.
1) Downstairs. If left unattended the valve will sometimes not close and keep draining water. It also doesn't flush very well.
2) Upstairs shared. The chain keeps coming apart and the valve is messed up. For some reason, and it could be that I don't understand how this thing's supposed to work, the valve appears to drain most of the water out the overflow and only a little into the reservoir. It's kinda backwards. So I hacked it so that it drains everything into the main tank and lets the overflow drain take care of that, but it still has problems with the shutoff. Per flush, it takes like a half hour to fill the reservior. It's noisy and just really lame. And if we turn off the water intake, it seems to leak all over the floor.
3) Upstairs MBR. This one leaks onto the floor when the water line is on. And it clogs on practically anything. Snicker all you want, Roger. This one will probably clog if you piss on it.
Anyhow, if you look up the wikipedia entry, there's a picture of a sink on top of a toilet water reservoir. I want one of those. Problem is, I can't find the name of it. All I know is that American toilet companies are too stupid to come up with good ideas like this, and that Toto has two of these. (Z Series, and PureRest) But googling for a Toto US distributor that carries these doesn't seem to be working.
What I did find was the Toto Neorest, the Lamborgini of toilets. It does the Japanese/European thing of spraying your butt. But it also drys it with a warm air jet, built in deoderizer, has heated seats, flushes by itself, has the controls on a wall mount LCD panel, and lifts either just the cover or both the seat and cover depending on whether it thinks you're about to stand or sit. It'll also detect if any solids are in there and flush in either a water saving mode or full blast. Oh, and it can flush 32 golf balls at once without violating government water saving rules and in one flush. And it'll put the seat down when you leave. And it costs $5,000.
$5,000.
....uh....
I think I'll have to settle for the sink on reservoir ones for now.
Posted by hachu at January 1, 2006 09:10 PM