Theres nothing the Internet can't fix, except the Internet.

As we are expecting a deluge of visitors it became my job to fix a few things up. OK, I actually volunteered but let me tell you, there are degrees of "voluntary". Anyway, we have been having a a bit of a situation with two of our toilet cisterns. Yeah I know, we have lots of 'em but let's not make an issue about it - after all, I have never boasted about our numerous facilities and never made others feel diminished about their corresponding lack of, have I?

Anyway, it's not such a big deal, you just take off the lid and fiddle with the float thing. I tightened the cap of the valve on one cistern and it seemed to be fixed so tried the other but no luck. So I pulled it apart and stared at it before reassembling only to find that my action had rendered it almost non functional. Perplexed by this I unscrewed the valve on the good cistern, furiously stared at it while making mental notes then returned to the second one. After more tooing and froing and fiddling about I now had two perfectly busted valves with water gushing over the walls and floor, everywhere but the cistern.

"I know what" I thought "let's google it" So I lept into the saddle and cranked up the big mac and hit the super highway. I dialled in "caroma" and "inlet valve" and "twin flush" and Bingo! a full house. There was a heap of diagrams, I didn't know that Caroma had so many cisterns and so many valves. And countries, Caroma is flushing the globe. Unfortunately my valve was not shown so I hit the forums.

Seems like Caroma have a lot of unhappy customers, there is no end of horror stories. The consensus was to entirely replace the internal workings with a high tech unit from Germany. You can even watch a video on Bunnings where a kindly handyman shows how to detach the cistern from the wall, disembowel the offending organ and replace it with a new Bunnings filler upper.

And there is more, Youtube is a DIY heaven with no end of instructional videos. One clip had my very own unit being attended to. This bloke must have had a hotel or motel as he replaced the lot, they were all playing up and he had calculated the loss of water in money terms. Must have been a retired banker as he was dressed too well.

So I thought about all this quality advice and wondered why a retired banker would buy a motel and then take a film of himself fixing a toilet cistern and post it onto the WWW. Obviously the answer was too simple. So I took out the rubber valve and went down the road to the plumbing supply outlet.

Yep, 2 x valve inserts @ $1.40 each incl tax and the problem was fixed.