Guitar Gear

Seriously.

Though GuitarGear.org essentially started out as a vanity site, an online diary for me to write down my thoughts about the gear I’d get or evaluate, one thing I vowed to myself when I started this blog was to never talk out of my ass with respect to gear. I had been online in some way, shape, or form since the ’80s, long before there was an official Internet. The amount of bloviating that occurred online even at that time annoyed me as people would speak about subjects at length and really have no facts to back up what they were saying. That wasn’t going to be me.

Oh yes, I can write – a lot. But I wasn’t going to get trapped in my own misinformation by talking out of my ass. So I made sure that when I wrote about gear I did my best to become as informed and knowledgeable as possible. Take, for instance, when I started writing about tube amps. Though I’m no electronics expert, I understand the fundamental workings of how they work; enough to have an intelligent conversation. I did a lot of research and talked to and even befriended experts on the subject. This dogged determination to be as well-informed as possible carried over into my life outside of writing about guitar gear.

I now know way more about how toilets work than I probably cared to know in the first place…

A couple of years ago, I purchased three American Standard Champion 4 toilets. This is the model that American Standard claims can flush a small bucket of golf balls in one flush. When I first got the toilets, they worked like magic. I couldn’t believe how well they worked. Then after about a year and half, a one of them started requiring a couple of flushes to fully evacuate the bowls. And it got so bad that it would take a few flushes to clear the bowl, so I declared that toilet off-limits. Luckily it was the master bath toilet and not a guest bathroom toilet.

I jumped on the Web and tried all sorts of things, from using a snake to even clearing out the flush jets under the rim of the bowls. I did the bucket test to see if my toilet flushed well by pouring a bucket of water into the bowl. I tried everything with respect to the drain portion of the toilet.

After being frustrated several times, I finally decided to find out how a toilet works to see if I could get any insight on what could be causing my slow flush. What I found out was that toilets flush based on a siphon action. That is, the contents of the bowl are NOT pushed out by the flushing action. They’re actually PULLED down the drain! If you look at the bottom of your toilet, you will see the outline of the siphon. It is the tubing that curves upward.

The jets under the rim serve to rinse off the sides of the bowl but more importantly, they also serve to fill the bowl, which creates pressure in the siphon at the bottom of the toilet. When that tube gets filled, and the water starts flowing down the drain, it creates a vacuum that pulls the rest of the water out of the bowl.

The velocity of the water filling the bowl and subsequently the siphon is extremely important. If the velocity is too slow, the siphon will not fill fast enough and create a vacuum. In my case, the first flush would just barely fill the siphon and the second flush would take it over the edge, so to speak.

So given that, I took a little nail and started clearing the jets of scale and build-up. It was pretty bad as the water in my area has a high concentration of calcium. Great for our bones and teeth, but horrible for plumbing. But even that physical clearing of the jets didn’t work. The velocity was still too low, which meant that there was a lot of build-up within the rim tube itself.

Finally, after a little more research, I saw that there was a way to chemically clear the rim. So I got a gallon of CLR. I poured half of it down the overflow tube and let it sit for a day, then before I went to bed, I poured the other half down the tube.

When I poured the first half gallon, the cleaner was barely trickling out the jets. I had seen videos where you could see it streaking down the sides of the bowl! I realized then that there must’ve been a lot of buildup in the rim. When I poured the second half-gallon down the tube, it flowed much better. The end result was that this morning, I flushed the toilet and it worked like it was new!

Now you know more about toilets than you ever wanted to know in the first place!

The point to this is that had I not been so driven in the first place to do research, I would’ve never solved the problem and would’ve just purchased a new toilet. I just saved myself $300-$500!