My family still does Christmas lists and a couple years ago I was struggling to figure out what to put on mine.\u00a0 I ended up adding a few silly items – included a Dual-Flush toilet replacement kit. When installed, you can lift the handle up for a 1\/2 flush (using less water) or down for a full one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps not surprisingly, my folks bought this for Christmas for me. I was delighted and eager to give it a try, but when I opened up the box it seems way more complicated than the packaging suggested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I set it aside for Another Day (\u2122) and figured I\u2019d get around to installing it eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fast forward to a few days ago when the upstairs toilet continued to run after flushing. Ah, the perfect opportunity and no excuses – it was time to install the Dual-Flush replacement kit and save the damn planet. One flush at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I took off the lid of the tank with practiced ease and then turned off the water. One good flush and I had a nearly empty tank. I skimmed the instructions to see what tools I needed and there were only two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A sponge<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And a pencil<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Really?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pencil was to mark the water line before draining the tank – so, I\u2019d already screwed that up. The sponge was to finish getting all the water out of the tank. So, I got a bucket and sponge and got the rest of the water out. Then while it was drying, I read a little more about removing the old system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was basically everything except the flapper and so I set to work removing the various parts until I had damp pile of plastic pieces on the floor in no particular order. I was going to throw these out, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back to the directions and things got a little worrying. There were a couple of pieces in the tank that were sealed in and not coming out without a fight – or being broken. And the pictures of Steps 1 and 2 were not matching up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had myself a sit and studied this directions more carefully before I broke anything. And, to my chagrin, there was a section neatly labeled \u201cincompatible\u201d. And one of those looked an awful lot like my tank set up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I checked the parts and sure enough, the brand name matched with the “incompatible” label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, this new dual flush thing wasn\u2019t going to work – and I had a floor covered in pieces of the old system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This might be a good time to mention that I\u2019m not a plumber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fortunately, I realized that there was only one of every piece and they could only go together in one way in the tank, With a little trial and even less error, I got everything put back into place and turned the water back on. And then I flushed the toilet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everything worked – though it still kept running when it was done. On the plus side, I had noted another way to adjust the float – so, I\u2019ll get that worked out over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just in case, I checked the downstairs toilet and it has the same setup. Not surprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The final verdict is that I\u2019m no worse off than when I started. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And for plumbing, that\u2019s a win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My family still does Christmas lists and a couple years ago I was struggling to figure out what to put on mine.\u00a0 I ended up adding a few silly items – included a Dual-Flush toilet replacement kit. When installed, you can lift the handle up for a 1\/2 flush (using less water) or down for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2528,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}