I haven't blogged about it yet, but since Friday we've had no hot water here in our second floor dining room of a restaurant apartment in Taipei. This is not the first time we've lost our ability to shower and breathe in and out at the same time, I think it's the fourth time actually. But this time it's different. The first time I wondered if some gas bill hadn't been paid, but was surprised to see my room mate climb out of his second story window onto the awning, surprised it supported him, behind the sign for the restaurant below. He had a single "D" cell battery in his hand. I leaned out of my window and saw him open a little door on what I've since learned is our water heater. After he replaced the battery we had hot water in only minutes.

I'm fairly certain that the battery provides some sort of spark to ignite gas, and now that I've braved the flimsy corrugated sheet metal awning myself, I know that the "D" cell also powers a tiny little green box, a controller for our water heater. And like I said, in my 9 months or so here, he's changed it about 3 times. I don't know why they put it out there.

But it's amazing what laziness makes you go through, the pain, the icy showers. This morning I skipped my shower all together. I was already stiff in the neck from a bus ride yesterday and didn't want to see what my stiff neck muscles did when that cold water touched my skin.

There are advantages to taking cold showers. I had to take several cold showers at Khyree and Jake's place when I stayed with them for several days, they had to replace a propane tank to get water. But all we had to do was replace a battery. The advantage to taking a cold shower is the warm feeling you get when you're done. Your body and skin feels warm like it's glowing, I'm sure it's very good for you, your heart or your circulation or something, but your skin is most likely just so happy that it's no longer being tortured by frigid water. I shorten the experience as much as I can manage by rinsing in the water, then stopping the water, lathering and soaping and scrubbing without the nasty cold water, then rinsing all the soap suds off. I hate it, even though it feels good when I'm done. I'll type it again: I hate it.

So today, after my failed after school nap, I went into the bathroom and straddled the toilet, facing the tank. Yes, not only do I shower cold, but the toilet hasn't been working for a whole week. It actually kind of flushes, but it doesn't do it with the enthusiasm that you expect, the enthusiasm that you take for granted in toilets that work properly. The issue was the tank, it didn't fill, actually it did fill but only after about 3 hours as if it were only filling because of some leak in some valve, which you could hear, an annoying running water sound.

I've messed with toilets before, the chains that pull up the flap sometimes get caught on the ballcock, which is very annoying but not very difficult to fix. But this toilet does not have a ballcock that I recognize, it's a modern toilet, I was not able to find any pictures of it's mechanisms on the Internet. So without trying to explain all the pipes, valves, and levers that I discovered in the back recesses of our low swung modern toilet, I'll just say that I narrowed the problem down to a rubber gasket in a valve that I have since identified as the Tank Refill Valve. The whole process of figuring all this out took about 5 hours spread across 3 days, 30 minutes of which involved trying to research toilets on the Internet. The Internet sites I found told me that I needed to replace the Tank Refill Valve or the gasket. Well I certainly don't have any of those things, and searching for a hardware store did not appeal to my laziness, even though I had already spent nearly 5 hours, at least most of those hours were spent sitting backwards on a toilet lid, but better than walking for miles in my opinion.

I'd also like to throw another detail into my Toilet Repair story: I cut myself twice. There really aren't sharp pieces in the back of a modern low swung toilet, but when you're convinced that some wet plastic piece or other should twist off, or move, or wiggle, your hand can easily slip and get itself punctured by almost any of the squarish or pointy objects in that small cavity behind the bowl. If that seems disgusting to you, you're not alone, even though the water in the tank doesn't come into direct contact with the bowl it's just scary to me to think I have toilet water from any part of the toilet possibly having had entered my bloodstream. But so far my hand hasn't changed color to green or white or anything so I think I'll be OK.

One of the reasons for my blogging this story is a huge sense of satisfaction I've gotten from fixing this toilet, only a few months after fixing my friends toilet with chewing gum and a coat hanger. I may try my hand at plumbing when I get back to the States just because it's so satisfying to hear a good solid flush when you're done.

So instead of buying and replacing the Tank Refill Valve: I improvised. There was a small hole gasket membrane thingy to allow a small about of water through to let the pressure on the top push the gasket back down and stop the flow of water, which was why my tank seemed to never fill. The only water it was getting was through that tiny little pin hole. So I put a piece of black electrical tape over the pin that pushes itself through that hole, making it smaller and tighter so the pressure be higher underneath than above to let water through underneath into the tank. It worked, yes I soon had a toilet happily refilling it's little tank. Once fixed I flushed it twice for no reason just to enjoy the site and the sound.

After I fixed the toilet I was so energized, my chest puffed with the pride of handimandidness, I put on my sandals and a coat with a hood, due to the rain, and went out to be even more productive: I bought a pack of 2 "D" cell batteries, a chocolate bar, and then went to my favorite eatery and ate my favorite dishes of fried rice and greens.

With my life looking optimistic, handy, and with a great sense of being responsible and adult, instead of letting my room-mate take care of it, I hopped out on the awning that I mentioned in the opening of this blog. But all I can say is that my day went downhill from there. I replaced the battery, and went in excitedly to test the hot water. None. I gave up for awhile wondering if there was some other secret step that my room-mate preformed behind that little metal door on the front of the water heater. My roommate walked in the door right as I was testing the hot water. I went into my room to get the second battery to show him that I had changed the battery. Props are nice when you don't know how to say things like "battery" or "hot water heater" in Chinese. I must have been distracted by my computer or something because by the time I leaned into his room to tell him I changed the battery I saw him dropping down from his window, he held out my shiny new replacement battery to show me that he had just changed it... not 15 minutes after I just had done the same thing. I told him I had already changed it.

He spent the next twenty minutes or so out on the awning yelling back to me to try the water again and again. Eventually he came back in, with his flash light and expressed that he had given up.

After a few minutes, I found myself back out there on the awning myself holding the sign behind me for support, checking the battery contacts. Then it started to rain hard, in moments my T-shirt was soaked through, but I didn't give up. The Taiwan twist to this story is that as I was standing on the awning I was above a sidewalk hoping that the couple under me that were busy putting on their scooter rain gear wouldn't notice me and freak out and tell me that it was dangerous to be on the awning and call the police or something. Although I don't know if people call the police here. People across the street could have seen me too if they had thought to look up to the second story and slightly the the right of an unremarkable yellow sign with Chinese that I assume names the restaurant I live above.

I wish this really was just a story that I was telling, I'd be taking a hot shower, but it's not, it's just a blog entry, a journal entry of my day to day struggles. I could not fix it. Tomorrow I will probably sleep late due to the dread of waking up and having to take a cold shower. I did peer into the inner workings of the water heater and noticed that distinctive green fuzz on the wires that lead into the little plastic controller box perched inside the heater. I suspect there is a lot of corrosion in that water heater preventing the flow of electricity that would initiate the charging of some sort of capacitor that would charge up and release that spark that would spark that flame that would heat that water that would mix with that cold water in my faucet and produce that lovely balance of warmth that I find so enjoyable each morning that I forget how good it is... until it's gone.

But I fixed the toilet! (edit 480) Permalink