Lately, I noticed that my bathroom toilet developed a slow leak such that the water tank would refill by itself without anyone pushing the lever. I checked the flapper and noticed the flapper was well passed its usable life – lots of calcium deposit and the perimeter of the flapper developed rough surfaces to not seal properly with the outlet ring. See below:

I purchased a replacement Korky flapper with an adjustable air holes for adjusting the timing of the closing from 1 to 8.

I tried from 1 to 8 and flapper still closed too soon resulting in poor or weak flushes, which would eventually lead to build up and expensive rooting bills.

The one that did the trick, despite Korky’s video instructions, is to loosen slightly the chain that connects between the handle bar to the flapper. My guess is that the slack of the chain create a whiplash condition to float up the flapper momentarily and long enough for the flapper to stay up for more water to flow out. I noticed this particular trick in my previous blog here. If there is insufficient slack (too tight), the pulling force would cause the flapper to bounce off and close the flapper too fast. And if there is too much slack, the flapper would not open. You’d need to experiment to come up with a optimal slack. For me it’s around 3/4″ to 1″. There is a sweep spot in the amount of the slack. Play with it but conserve water if you’re in a drought situation like we do here in California.

For a while now, I’ve noticed the drape in my master bedroom was getting very difficult to pull its string to close and open. Then I noticed the bracket that supported the drape track started getting pulled out of the drywall. To avoid further drywall damage, I moved the bracket a couple of inches to the right. This didn’t help. The same drywall problem persisted.

I decided to get rid of the old track and purchase a new drape pole and 20 rings to hang the drape without the complicated string pulling mechanism. The most difficult part of the installation was to determine the height of the support bracket. It needs to allow the drape to just clear the floor – high enough to clear the drape and low enough to cover the gap. I originally made a mistake of assuming ring cover the diameter of the pole but it turned out to a wrong assumption. There was at least a 1/4″ of gap in the ring. Then the pole also sag a bit due to the weight of the drape and the fact that there is no support bracket in the middle, unlike the original drape track. I decided to placed two support brackets at each end to help relieve the weight of the force. Finally, there were lots of holes left from the previous track that has 3 additional brackets in the middle. Lots of drywall patch work.

After I was all done with the installation, I decided to dissect the old track and figure out where it broke. I did see some broken plastic piece in the opposite end of the track. After playing with the track, it dawned on me that all the extra force problem was due to a loose screw at the pivot pulley mechanism. Had I just tighten that screw or added another screw to fix the pulley in place, I would have fixed the entire problem!

What an ironic twist to my ordeal! Yes, I did end up with a more modern drape pole and lots of “fun” time shopping and installing the new track. But just tightening one screw? Really?

The lessons learned:
1. Always try to understand why things don’t work before you start disassembling things. You may find out you don’t need to do much to fix the problem like in this case.
2. Perform a postmortem to understand why things don’t work at the end can contribute a great deal to your learning.