Jinx,

On Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:56:37 +1200, Jinx wrote:

> > Her water is not very hard
> 
> Sean, I recently cleaned our cistern valve again. This needs doing
> every few years. The problem is always brown manganese build-
> up. I take the whole thing apart and scrub with a nail brush the
> flapper, needle valve, seat, everything, and it works good as new.
> Our water pressure is good, and I can't say I've noticed any kind
> of failure due to that
> 
> When I was in the UK "hard" meant not a lot of chalk in the water.
> Being on the south coast our water was definitely very soft and
> lime scale was very common after just a short time. For example
> we'd have a pebble in the kettle to seed the scale and keep it off the
> element

Hang on, you seem to have this upside-down - "hard" means there *is* a lot of calcium in the water:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_water

Where I am it's about 22 degrees Clark (Hard to Very Hard) and it causes a lot of scale.  Where I used to work (about 20 miles upstream) the water was so hard 
that you could stand a mouse on it - and we had to descale the office kettle every day.

I have a water softener, but since one of its valves started leaking it's been out of commission (must get round to fixing it!) and as a result the immersion heater in 
the hot tank is seriously furred-up (must get round to fixing it!).

I seem to remember that when I visited NZ the water was generally softer than here - at least in Dunedin.

To get back on-topic, scale accumulates in the filter on the toilet cistern inlet valve - it's a "silent" pressure-balanced valve which has a small hole in the 
diaphragm to balance the pressure, and this clogs very easily, so the filter is vital.  I stopped using brass "Yorkshire" valves years ago, mainly because they are 
noisy and need the washer replacing every so often - now I use these people's:  http://www.fluidmaster.com - model 400 for bottom fill, 748 for side fill.  I'd 
recommend the OP changes to one of these if he decides to replace the existing valve.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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