More on toilets (and other stuff)

I know I said I wouldn't write about toilets much, but I'm driven to doing it again.

The flushing mechanism is incredibly simple - you pull the handle, and it lifts a sort of plug, so the water falls from the cistern into the toilet. Let go of the handle, and it stops. The system in the UK is much more sophisticated (and wasn't actually invented by Thomas Crapper) - which involves a syphon to suck the water up and drop it down again - you pull the handle to start the process, and then it's off on it's own. The advantage of the syphon system is that it flushes hard, even when there's only half a tankful of water. The plughole system (as I'm going to call it, 'cos I don't know another name) means you have to hold the handle for as long as you want to flush for, and then you can stop when, ermm... , the need has passed. Which I guess saves water.

But the American toilets are clever at the other end. They have more water in them to start with (I used to see them occasionally at home - our neighbours had one when I was young , and they had a bidet too, ). When some water goes in, it increases the level enough to start water flowing out, and this creates a syphon which sucks all the errmmm, contents of the toilet away. Then some more water comes in to refill the toilet. This seems more sensible to me - UK toilets seem to work on the principle of massive dilution (a bit like homeopathy, eh?), which means that Domestos, and other stuff, can stay behind. US toilets empty themselves completely, and then refill with water.

However, to create the syphon, the hole at the back of the toilet, that the stuff goes down, has to be on the small side. And that's created a problem twice now, in one of our toilets. We almost got a house with only one toilet; now we realised that it's lucky we didn't.

While I'm on about domestic things, I'll continue.

We've lived in two places now, which both had a dishwasher. So I have an N = 2 from which to generalise, which I think gives me some authority. And both dishwashers (and by extension, American dishwashers) are rubbish.

Dishwashers, as I know them, have a squirty thing at the bottom, and a squirty thing half way up, under the top later. This way stuff at the bottom and stuff at the top, get washed. The squirty thing at the bottom usually squirts harder, so you put dirty pots and stuff at the bottom, and less dirty stuff at the top. It's occasionally a pain, because something too tall sticks up, or something thin falls down, and stops the top squirty thing spinning, which means that the stuff at the top doesn't get clean.

American dishwashers solve this problem by not having a thing at the top. The thing at the bottom just squirts really hard (and on our second one has a sort of showerhead that extends a bit from the centre). But this means that if you put dirty pots at the bottom, they completely block the spray to the top. Stuff at the top comes out almost dry. And if you put them at the top, they don't get clean, because it doesn't squirt very hard there.

I was going to talk about washing machines too, but I'll stop there.



The dishwashers here have a squr