Today, for this hot Sunday. We tackled a long overdue job of servicing the toilet in the back of the Garage. There was an overflow problem and it seems to have gotten worse in the last few months. Our water bill said that our consumption has gone up significantly. So we inspected the water inlet valve mechanism and discovered a small lump of foreign material. We cleaned the valve and put it back together and all seems to be back to normal again. But we did have to replace the front plasterboard panel that made up the boxing surrounding the cistern.
We also glued the old ceramic toilet bowl on one side where there was an old crack from years ago when we rescued this serviceable piece of bathroom ware from the outside toilet as it was then when we brought the property 17 years ago. It probably was the original toilet from when it was constructed way back in the 1945 approximately we think!!
Then after the Formula 1 Grand Prix, we serviced the garden shredder, our heavy duty machine that chops up garden waste up to to 40mm thick fresh branches or 25mm dry stuff! The shredder needed a new “crunching” aluminium plate shoe that is adjustable to achieve zero gap between the slowly rotating steel blades and this shoe, ensuring that the plant material is chopped into pieces, no matter how small or thin it is. It has a clever trick of crunching the thicker pieces so the woody parts are slit apart to speed up composting.
The old aluminium plate had a crack across its structure and that is probably what had caused the shredder to not work very well for a while now.
We tested out the newly serviced machine with a large pile of holly clippings (recently freshly done) and a really old pile of ivy trimmings and produced about 6 very large trug loads of shredded material and a couple of trugs of leaves, all dumped onto our pile of sod at the top of our garden.