- [Voiceover] Plumberparts.co.uk Honest reviews and advice. - Hold tight and welcome to today's Plumberparts.co.uk video. Mmm, mmm, mmm! My name is James and today we're gonna be having a look at a
very very simple problem you can get with your
toilet, especially if it's a push-button one like the little one that we've got in the background here. What can happen is sometimes you can press the push-button flush on your toilet, it can be one of those nice little remote push-button flushes, the ones that are just on top of the cistern, that look a little bit like this one here. Then once you've pressed it, everything comes out the cistern, then it just keeps on tricklin' in. Now, we're gonna show you very quickly how one of these work, using our lovely little fake system we've got in the background here, and then we're also gonna show you how very quickly to fix this problem
cause it's so easy to fix. Alright, I hope you enjoy the video and remember to subscribe. Hold tight! So let's first here have a quick look at the flush unit we've got here itself. A closer look at these,
they're really, really easy to instal in the first place. They got a nice little rubber seal underneath and there's
a big nut that goes up underneath the system that holds that on and makes the
right water-tight seal. You can also have a lot of these have adjustments for how
much you want to flush, how much you want to go through. The other slight difference
you can have with two different types of
push-button flush-unit are you can have the
fixed-button one like here. You've got your half-flush
and your full-flush, and you have two little rods that go down onto the button from the cistern cap and they can go on there
or the cistern lid. Or, you can have one
that has a remote cable that goes off to a button elsewhere like in a bit of woodwork
or something like that. They're really popular as well cause they're so versatile. So if you look here, when we push this up you'll see there that that little paddle lifts up like so, and lifts up like so as well on both those buttons. Now, we have different
heights of float here that when the water gets
down to a certain level that'll activate the flow and
also close the flush, okay? Now the thing is
sometimes the main problem you can actually have
is that the water-flow going into the cistern is
so high and so fast that the water-level never
really gets down far enough to actually allow the float to activate and shut the valve off. And it kind of holds the valve
up like so, just like that. So the first thing I
do is pop the lid off, press the button and have a look, and actually see if the amount of water going into the system from the fill valve is so much that it's
not actually allowing it to fully empty, it's kind of beating the water going into the
toilet and flushing away. So have a look at that first. If that is the case,
you'll see a small pipe underneath, just like this one here, and that will have a
small valve on it like so. You've got a cross on the valve just here, at the moment that's in the off position, if that is in the inline position like so it's fully open as you can just see there. So what you often want to do is basically half-close it and try and strangle down the amount of water going into the toilet cistern. That is usually the problem and that's the quickest way of sorting it out. So easy to do. The other thing you can do with these to see if there's a problem,
is sometimes you can actually pull off this top flush piece
just like so, like that. This bit will stay in the toilet this is where the water comes out of, we don't need that for this bit now. I'm just gonna plop that down. We're interested in this piece here, okay. This is the damper that moves up and down. Now, as you can see on the bottom there, we've got a nice little rubber seal. And what can happen is,
is the rubber can get old. Sometimes it can actually
sort of mould itself in the up position, it doesn't
actually quite seal properly. You can buy rubber seal
replacements for these in most the plumber supplies in the U.K. They're really, really
easy just to pull off and pop another one on, and often that will sort your problem out. The other problem you can have is, when you put this back together, and we take a close look
here, we can see that this has to sit down on this seat. If anything gets stuck under this seat, a little bit of limescale,
sometimes people put the smelly tablets and
that, that gum the cistern, that can get stuck under there. So you know, it might be a good idea to stick you hand in there,
the water is not dirty, it is only like fresh water,
it's not got any wee-wees or poo-poos in it, so
you don't have to worry. And basically run your finger round there and make sure that that's nice and clean and there's no nicks in the plastic. And often if you do
that, you see something maybe flow into the toilet and then that will seal up properly and work fine. But anyway, we're have a
quick look at how these work. And we're gonna fill up our
massive bucket with water and flush loads of water
out into the bucket. Enjoy! Tell you what let's fit
this piece in here now, real simple we put that on
there, we fit our hole in here. We did a video a few weeks ago
about how siphon-units work, and we used this box here. I'll leave the link to
that just about now, on the screen so you can click on that, and have a look if that's
gonna help you out. Remember to subscribe. God, how many times do I have to say it? You know, hopefully we're
gonna help you out here, so. So right now, we've got
this nice and full of water here, you should just
be able to press this. Oh yeah, the laughing wear. You see how quickly that
cuts off that one there, and there we can set
our half-flush as well. As you can see it's a lot quicker. You can hold to these flushes using those scales on the side. And honestly now, I could just probably put my hand in here,
and act as if there was a bit of something caught under the seat of this little flap here, and make it so it sort of half starts to leak you know? Basically just imagine
there's a little bit stuck under there and what would happen you just start gettin' that. That's a start runnin'
and runnin' and running. As I said, you can
change that rubber washer really, really easily just
by pullin' the top-hat. What will happen is,
you turn the water off, you pull the top-hat and
the whole of this system will empty into our
toilet, you watch this. There we go, you get that out of here and now it's going down the toilet. No big deal, everything's fine. But we can still change this
bit here at our leisure. So if we look closely, if
we've got too much water going into this cistern here, it's not going to allow us to activate this float we've got
here on our half-flush. And if we twist round and have a look at the other side, further down you'll see there's the float there
for our full-flush, okay? So that's the main problem, so when we press our button, you'll
see now when we press the button for half-flush,
you'll see how this actually reacts as water
leaves the cistern. Did you see that? As soon as that dropped there, it allowed our plunger
to actually make a seal. The other thing that can
cause one of these to actually run into the toilet, is if you've actually got your ball-valve set too high. That means is that ball-valve
like this is set so high that when it shuts off in the cistern it's actually letting water go
into this integral overflow. Now what these do, these are
brilliant, they basically eradicate the need for you
to have an overflow pipe that sticks outside and may drip. And what can happen is,
if one of these fails instead of flooding all over the floor, it can go down this pipe
here and into the toilet, warning you there's a problem. So that's the great thing
as well, and it's the last real reason that could
be why these constantly run. Sometimes of course, the actual flush-unit just can be knackered, I
mean it could be the fact that one of the floats
is ruptured, or got old or brittle and released its air, and isn't actually shuttin' off the
damper anymore at the bottom. Or it could be the bottom piece that's attached to the
toilet, that the rubber actually sits on, is so
knackered and mashed up that it's never gonna work again. But that's quite a rare case, and really, ninety-nine percent of the time you should just be able
to effect a quick repair like the ones we've shown you there. Obviously, if you've got a
problem with a fill-valve, we've got loads of videos on how fill-valves work in toilets. Just check out our Toilet Playlist that's appearing in the corner right now. I hope you've enjoyed today's video and I hope you subscribe. We do loads of stuff
on Twitter and Facebook so please follow us at
either of those places there. We've got lots of pictures
of plumbing disasters, also if you've got any
questions, or you've seen something that's really unusual
in the world of plumbing, you can send us a picture
or even send us a video using your mobile to our Facebook page. It might make it onto one of
our "ask the plumber" videos. We're also gonna show
you a playlist to that coming up right now. Anyway, again, I hope you subscribe and I'll see you in our next video. Remember everyone, to hold tight! - [Voiceover] Plumberparts.co.uk Honest reviews and advice.
