19 May 2014

My Toilet Preoccupation!

Did you think that you'd heard quite enough from me about bathrooms.  If so, don't read on...I'm telling you, I can go for hours about this stuff!

Toilets. 

I am ridiculously opinionated and have discovered that here in England I'm a bit of an oddity! Sales-staff look at me as if I have lost the plot whilst I question them in detail about their sanitary-ware.  I consider myself a true 'Northern European' now.



I like almost everything, except the extent of tiling.

I hate seeing and cleaning the visible waste pipes at the back of loos. 
I hate stupidly small flush buttons.
I hate loos that need to be flushed more than once.
I hate hard to clean angled-bowls. 

I'm collecting stories from friends and family about toilets; the seat hinges are corroded by boys peeing inaccurately, my nephews mechanically destroyed a brand new toilet seat within weeks - no one is quite sure how they did it..., toilets installed only a few years ago refusing to refill as the mechanism has broken.


Back to first principles - everything breaks, so things have to be able to be changed/replaced easily!  

After our trip to Brussels (not Belgium again!) my inklings were confirmed and we are definitely installing Geberit concealed cisterns with flush plates.  They were in all the places we went in Belgium, public and private, and not one loo failed to work beautifully! 




This is all kinds of wonderful.  © Geberit

When researching on the interweb I could only find the in-frame concealed cisterns made for wall hung toilets.  The other concealed cisterns had the small round button flush, and I don't want those.  The advantage of the flushplate is that you can access all the internal gubbings for maintenance through this space.  When you have the button ones you have to build a service hatch.  It was looking as if this was going to be an expensive choice, Charlie tried to dissuade due to cost issues but I was determined - this was important!  

Then I called Geberit and got all the information I needed! I found I can have the Sigma Concealed Cistern compatible with a flush plate of my choice, which can come frameless. HOORAY!   This is looking like it will come in as just over £100/cistern, including the flushplate.  A very respectable price as for a moment I thought I was spending about £300/cistern- I would then have had a beautiful wall hung pan, which I happen to like a lot, but a budget is a budget. 



A floor standing toilet with a flush plate above. © Geberit


I have the code numbers I need now, so I'm delighted!

By the way I have nothing against Grohe, who also do them with flush-plates, it's just that I haven't come across an installed one yet, so I'm going with what I've seen.

I'm drawing up a shortlist for the actual pans.  Simple straight lines, nothing fancy. I've made sales assistants take off loo seats to show me how easy it is to replace them.  It seems there is no universal loo seat anymore so you have to take account of their cost, for replacement, and they can vary hugely. I'm very taken with the quick release mechanism you can find which allows you to take the whole seat off and clean really easily.  I like to see the fixings covered with a metal cap and preferably rubber gaskets inside.  I didn't think I cared about soft-close but I'm finding that actually it is probably a good thing when you have boy children.  

Bored yet? Was this too much? I warned you, I take this all very seriously...!


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