Slow overflow of water from toilet cistern to bowl

I think the Fluidmaster is a 50mm hex nut - can't check right now as I've got the cistern on the loo again, full of water. Testing to see if it's stopped dripping.
 
I have now got the cistern connector kit and a doughnut washer, and I've turned off the mains water and drained the cistern (again) in preparation for fitting them.

1) Does anybody have any advice on sliding the toilet back into place onto the main soil pipe after I've done the cistern screws? I tried to get it centered and firmly pushed on when I left it last Monday, but when I flushed it to drain the cistern today some water still leaked out, enough to wet the floor but not flood it. The obvious problem is that it's not really possible to see what is going on when you push it up against the wall.

Is it just a straight friction fit or do I need to do something more? Tips would be very welcome.

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2) I'm getting a bit fed up of turning the mains off each time I want to battle with this loo. I would like an isolation valve between the metal nut of the water feed pipe (which seems to have an internal diameter 19 mm) and the threaded plastic pipe of the Fluidmaster 400UK inlet valve (20 mm). I thought this compression isolation one might do the job, and it has copper olives so OK for plastic pipe. But it looks like I'd need one female (not sure if that's the right term - to accept the Fluidmaster pipe) and one male, to go into the nut on the end of the water pipe, and this looks like two female. Any suggestions?

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1. Many plumbing fittings are still measured in the Imperial system, even if pipes are Metric!
2. The shank of the inlet valve will be threaded 1/2" BSP (British Standard Pipe).
3. Assuming the flexi hose in your second photograph fits the inlet valve shank, then it is also 1/2" BSP.
4. You need:
4a. A 1/2" BSP / 15 mm compression tap connector. (E.g. Screwfix 58294)
4b. A short length of 15 mm pipe to connect to the tap connector's compression end.
4c. An isolation valve for the other end of the short piece of pipe.
4d. An adaptor to fit the flexi hose onto the isolation valve. (E.g. Screwfix 2665R)
4e. You can get a tap connector with a built in isolation valve, but I don't know where at the moment. If you get one of these you will still need the adaptor (4d above), but you won't need the pipe.
 
oldbuffer said:
4d. An adaptor to fit the flexi hose onto the isolation valve. (E.g. Screwfix 2665R)
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Thank you, that was educational. I have a Screwfix locally but 2665R isn't available at the moment. They have something similar on Amazon, which I have ordered, but in present circumstances will probably take most of a week, so I will probably use the existing inlet pipe for now and return to this once I can get all the parts together.

Just another question, when people talk about 1/2" or 3/8" BSP, what actually are they measuring? Is it diameter of the pipe, of the outer diameter of the connectors on the pipe, or the inner diameter, or something else.

For example, I can see that 19 mm - the inner diameter of the nut mentioned above - is about 0.748 inches so that looks like 3/8", so that looks like a pretty straightforward mapping of metric onto inches. But 15 mm is about 0.59 inches - it doesn't resemble anything in imperial measurements! How does something like that 15 mm even come about?
 
BSP threads come in two forms, tapered (BSPT) and plain (BSPP). Both refer to the nominal inside diameter of steel pipe, so of course the wall thickness (doubled) has to be added to get the outside diameter. This is why a 1/2" BSP male thread is a good deal more than 1/2" in diameter over the outside of the thread.
 
durhamplumber said:
Too right Bro!
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I was a bit surprised and disappointed by just how cheap the components were, to be honest. It was a new build with a tight budget, so obviously there's pressure on margins from the plumbing team's perspective, but the screws they used to hold the cistern to the wall had corroded badly after only five years. And the cistern blanking plug had started to break up and come apart. Again, it seems like a false economy to me to use parts that are of such low quality.
 
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strugglingdiyer said:
the screws they used to hold the cistern to the wall had corroded badly after only five years.
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They would only be normal steel screws rather than using brass. That's an indication of the quality of the plumber not really saving money on the cost of the hardware. Brass screws wouldn't really have been much more & they probably just didn't get any. Certainly wouldn't have killed their bottom line.

strugglingdiyer said:
the cistern blanking plug had started to break up and come apart
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That's a strange one, not normally an issue with plastics breaking down and wouldn't really be the installer as the hundreds of toilets would probably have come as a kit & possibly already built.
 
Madrab said:
That's an indication of the quality of the plumber not really saving money on the cost of the hardware.
Click to expand...
Well, whether it's penny-pinching or lack of care, it leads to the same outcome in this case.

The plug was odd. The plastic end cap, with the big "plus" mark in the top, had started to fragment into pieces, so that when after removing the cistern I gave it an exploratory poke, there was nothing to keep it in the cistern and it just fell right through.
 
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