The bolts use a plastic washer and plastic nuts that slide into plastic rails of the plastic cistern. It’s really flimsy. As I tighten the nuts, I can hear the cracking sound of the plastic washers cracking internally. I’ve reinforced them with a bit of thin sheet metal but whatever I do cannot rely on bolts to add much pressure. This is also why I kind of doubt a rubber flanged gasket working even if I could track one down.

But indeed using all gummy stuff would likely work (but messy!). I’ll try it if my next plan fails.

In US the most common type of seal is a wax ring.

I’ve seen those used between the toilet and the floor on US toilets. I didn’t know they also used them between the cistern and bowl. That might work here but finding one locally seems unlikely but I’ll have to look anyway.

But everything needs to be extremely rigid, any movement later will break the seal.

Well, cistern is plastic and flimsy so maybe it wouldn’t work. I’m also thinking the hard rubber gaskets might only work well for a heavy ceramic cistern.

I appreciate all the recycling tips. People around here just use them to decorate street corners without cleaning them up first. I never see them getting dumped, so I guess the city porcelain beautification project must be happening late at night.

One practical use I might consider is for the parking competition. Sometimes people try to reserve street parking by putting junk on the street in front of their house until they need to park. A heavy old ceramic toilet might work well for that as probably no one else would want to touch it to take a parking spot.

I just removed the cistern for like the 6th or so time to inspect. The gummy stuff appears to adhere very well to both the ceramic and the foam. I would be quite surprised if the water were getting between them. I suspect the most likely theory now is water goes between the foam and the cistern and over top the foam. To test this, I guess I will cut out a paper ring and place that on top of the foam and see if part of the paper gets wet. If the paper gets wet, then I’m thinking I will wrap electrical tape around the cistern down spout to widen it a bit, to get a tighter fit in the foam ring. And if that fails I guess i will put some of the gummy stuff on the top of the foam, though that will make for a mess everytime the cistern needs to be removed.

It’s bizarre that thermostatic mixers are costly in the US. I can get a new one as cheap as €25 if I shop out the sales, or probably €10 2nd hand.

Tankless water heaters are really lagging as well in the US, and absurdly costly. I’m sure that will get corrected eventually. But in Europe tankless boilers are the norm and used in combination with thermostatic mixers. The lack of tank causes a delay in hot water because it’s less instant than a pre-heated tank. The heating element takes time to fire and reach a high temp. So you are even more tempted to open the hot valve 100% until the hot water comes, which means you have to diligently readjust the valve to avoid scalding.

The luxury fix to that delay is to have a 3rd pipe that cycles the (cold) hot water line to keep it hot in the pipes. This seems quite wasteful and complex so I wouldn’t want to install that.

The thermostatic mixers can get as cheap as €25. Though I think the cheap ones have a degree of slippage, whereby mid-shower I have to increase temp. I don’t know if that’s because it lost track of my setting, or if I adjusted to the temp physiologically and need hotter water to psychologically feel the same level of heat.

What kind of bothers me about the pressure balance design is you cannot tell from the pics if it’s really pressure balanced. I think the one handle style goes back decades, and originally did not maintain a balance. You have a joystick of sorts but if the pressure on one pipe changes you don’t know if it internally balances to maintain the ratio. So you have to read the product description and trust it.

Yeah, kind of. I’m glad to hear they have that capability. But note that there are some non-thermostatic designs that come close to achieving the same effect. Those have a memory of sorts, where they know you want X volume of hot water and Y volume of cold water. Then if the pressure in one drops or increases, the valve will adjust the other line ensure the hot and cold have the same ratio regardless.

That’s pretty good. But it assumes the hot water and cold water are each at constant temps. So imagine if you get to near the end of a hot water tank supply, the hot water will gradually become colder. In that case, a thermostatic valve will open the hot even more to chase the temp you want. Whereas the pressure balance style will not. Perhaps more importantly, the pressure balance style does not counter the fact that the hot line will be initially cold since the hot water cooled down while sitting in the pipe. So you have to fiddle with readjustments until the hot pipe is maxed out.

You have two controls, 1 for temp and one for pressure (instead of the traditional hot and cold with independent pressure controls on each). The temp knob has a stop in one position as you turn it, which gives 38°C water. The cheaper models are external and use a wax cylinder inside:

Wax expands as it gets warm. So when you first add pressure, internally the hot water valve is 100% open. Then as the water gets hotter at the valve, it closes and starts letting cold water in to retain the temp you select. It reacts quite fast too, so even if you have screaming hot water arrive at the fixture it’s quick enough to protect you from scalding. You set it and forget it. If someone else in the house flushes a toilet or runs a washer or dishwasher, thus causing the cold water to lose pressure, the thermostatic fixture will automatically adjust to maintain the temp.

The pricier ones are internal, which means all the complex valves are buried in the wall. And instead of wax they use a bi-metallic mechanism (which exploits the fact that a couple diferent metals bend differently with temp, or something like that). They look like this:

I think that has 2 pressure knobs, one for rainfall and one for the wand.

Whole external kits with rainfall and wand start at €100. If you just want the mixer bar and wand, it can be as cheap as €25. The internal kits start at around €500.

That’s a different kind of leak. A leaky valve isn’t my issue. But indeed it is nice to have replaceable cartridges so when a valve goes bad it does not require digging up the wall and replumbing.

That’s hard to imagine. I would expect the plastic parts to withstand near boiling temps. The temp should drop some along the route. Often the the problem is people have their hot water tanks too low (to save energy), and then bacteria lives in the tank. So ideally the tank should be out of survivable range of most bacteria, and then showers should have a thermostatic mixer to prevent scalding. OTOH, if it’s a tankless boiler, you can probably get away with lower temps. So I would be tempted to conclude the cartridge you had was bad quality.

The others are right. Trying to stream from a torrent seems wasteful and complex.

But if you must for some strange reason, perhaps it would work to use webtor.io to produce an http-reachable audio file which could be curl/wget-fetched and piped to an audio decoder/player. I doubt you could make webtor fetch pieces linearly from the beginning. You would likely have to wait until the last piece is fetched to start streaming.

I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.

Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.

It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).

You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).

I didn’t see the OP’s pic but these groups generally work against enshitification of the world:

• !asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net
• !activist_investing@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
• !escapebigtech@lemmy.escapebigtech.info
• !cyber_activism@sopuli.xyz
• !netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
• !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
• !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
• !anticonsumption@sopuli.xyz
• !fightforprivacy@feddit.ch
• !offgrid@slrpnk.net
• !foss@beehaw.net
• !privacy@links.hackliberty.org
• !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net

Notice that none of those communities are on Cloudflared instances (thus also avoid propagating the enshitified portion of the fedi).

Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

• Amazon
• Cloudflare
• Microsoft
• Facebook
• Google
• Apple
• (surveillance advertisers in general)
• (all closed-source s/w)
• HP
• Proctor & Gamble
• Unilever
• all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
• many shitty banks
• Paypal
• AT&T
• GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
• BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
• Bayar-Monsanto
• Dupont
• Hershey
• Nestlé
• Exxon/Mobil
• Comcast
• Koch
• Home Depot
• Lowes
• …etc

Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

That’s good to know. I would hope a metal anchor to reshape when temp causes expansion. It’s a shame to hear it’s the brick that’s forced to expand. In my case it’s a solid metal rod, so it sounds like the metal is guaranteed to split the brick in a temp change.

It sounds like I have to pull out the shank, bore the hole to 10mm, and either use chemical anchor or fasten it using a sheet metal w/2 nuts.

I could not pull it out with my hands after tapping it in. But to be clear, there’s only a sheer force to deal with, and it’s light.

I cut a bicycle axle bolt in half, and embedded it in the brick so there is a bicycle sprocket on the wall. Then a chain wraps another sprocket, which turns a shaft that goes all the way though the wall to the other side, where it connects to a right-angle gearbox, which attaches to a water valve. It’s lightweight overall… just the weight of a sprocket, chain, and a small decorative wood thing out of wood to serve as a handle.

This might come a bit too late but why didn’t you just get threaded rod and use one of these instead?

I did not know anchors like that existed for machine bolts. That’s good to know! However, it would not have helped in this situation. The bicycle axle has non-standard threading (~9mm bolt with a thread pitch that’s 2 steps away from the norm). Since it had a special nut that interfaced to ball bearings, I could not bring in a standard bolt or threaded rod. And the threaded portion of the axle was short enough that no threads could have gone into the wall. I could have added threads to the bare portion, but my die set skips the ø=9mm size.

I was asking more for future reference – whether or not I should ever repeat this. And I think you answered that. Even if I get lucky in the future on getting a perfect fit at that moment, temp changes could blow it. I guess I’ll assume anchors (chemical and mechanical) are designed to handle the temp changes.

oh, right… that reminds me… I hadn’t heard of kerosene for cleaning but I’ve heard gasoline is good for cleaning chains.

I’ve also heard WD-40 is a cocktail of mostly solvents and better as a cleaner than a lubricant. Supposedly wd-40 just leaves a coating of mineral oil after it cleans something.

I also wonder about acetone, or carburetor cleaner (which contains acetone).

Right, but these were specifically for cleaning drains. One of them was kitchen drain specific, and the other two were for drains in general. But indeed it’s possible that the clog was not even organic… perhaps calcium deposits from hard water.

I wonder if pouring a whole bottle of enzymes would have worked. When pouring just 50—100ml or so, it would spread out on the bottom of the pipe and only touch the bottom part of the clog. But if a whole liter rushes through at once then it would cover the whole clog. But it’d be a pricey test.

I documented a drain horror story here, the fiasco of which involved 3 different enzyme-based drain cleaners. They seem to have a dual purpose: use a small amount every 1 or 2 weeks as a maintenance task, or pour down a large amount to work on a clog. I had a very slow drain and the enzymes made no apparent difference. But I know in general enzyme cleaners are quite good. It’s amazing how well they work on the oven. I had a general purpose enzyme based cleaner that worked great for things like food spills that dried on a wall.