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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On Jun 1, 9:15*pm, "Robert Green" wrote:

My dad had the same problems and I am on the approach curve with moderate to
severe short term memory loss that's advancing. *I read posts like this
knowing that I'd better think about implementing some of them while I still
can. *I see two approaches to this problem.



I realize that this is a repair group, but I'd like to respond to the
issue
of approaching Alzheimer's you mention.
I suggest that you investigate the term "low dose naltrexone", within
the quote
marks, with the second term as Alzheimer's.
Be willing to consider the prospect of halting the advancement of the
condition.
After all, you have already shown that it is in your family history.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have questions. But if you do
the research,
you should be able to get a pretty good idea of why I've made these
comments.

And if you are reading this with concerns about cancer, autoimmune
dysfunction,
alcohol or narcotics addiction, and others issues, just use the first
term, with your
concern as the second.

You just might be surprised at what you find.
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On Jun 2, 1:30*pm, Borrall Wonnell wrote:
On Jun 1, 9:20*am, (Doug Miller) wrote:

One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.


Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?


[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]


One member of our household struggles with a similar clogging
problem. *Happy to say that it has nothing to do with Alzheimer's,
age, or the amount of TP used. *It's simply a volume issue.

An anti-clogging toilet is a good option, requires no additional
training on the part of the user. *Won't work 100% but definitely
lessens the chances of a problem.

The bulletproof fix (even for most regular toilets) is FEFO - "flush
early, flush often". *This defeats the intent of modern low-flow
toilets but I can tell you it's far preferable to the alternative
mess. *For the OP, this wouldn't work well (Alzheimer's).

Having said that, bolt-on (retrofit) automatic flushers are
available. *We had a bunch installed at work recently. *The premise is
simple...detect when a person is present and flush at the appropriate
time (when the person leaves). *I wonder if you could get one that
flushed intermittently when the person is actually sitting
down...FEFO. *Might be worth looking into, if a little startling for
the user!


Metamucil to deal with the "volume" issue. Leading to more frequent
evacuations. Need good hydration.
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On Jun 4, 7:14*am, Michael B wrote:
On Jun 1, 9:15*pm, "Robert Green" wrote:

My dad had the same problems and I am on the approach curve with moderate to
severe short term memory loss that's advancing. *I read posts like this
knowing that I'd better think about implementing some of them while I still
can. *I see two approaches to this problem.


I realize that this is a repair group, but I'd like to respond to the
issue
of approaching Alzheimer's you mention.
I suggest that you investigate the term "low dose naltrexone", within
the quote
marks, with the second term as Alzheimer's.
Be willing to consider the prospect of halting the advancement of the
condition.
After all, you have already shown that it is in your family history.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have questions. But if you do
the research,
you should be able to get a pretty good idea of why I've made these
comments.

And if you are reading this with concerns about cancer, autoimmune
dysfunction,
alcohol or narcotics addiction, and others issues, just use the first
term, with your
concern as the second.

You just might be surprised at what you find.


Might as well throw in a URL as a start point.
http://www.webspawner.com/users/ldnforad/index.html
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On 6/1/2011 7:20 AM, Doug Miller wrote:
One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.

Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?

[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]


Sounds like you may be suffering from a low flow toilet that has a poor
design as most did when first implemented and some do now?

If that is the case you may want to replace it with one of the much
better performing models that are available.
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On Jun 4, 3:56*am, Michael B wrote:
On Jun 1, 3:35*pm, notbob wrote:

On 2011-06-01, Oren wrote:


On Wed, 1 Jun 2011 05:21:19 -0700 (PDT), Thomas
Limit the amount of tp available
I was thinking that. *


Not a good idea, as that may create worse problems. *


I'm caring for my 84 yr old Alheimers mother and she has problems
thoroughly cleaning herself. *Improper cleaning can lead to
irritation, inflamation, and eventually infection, physical problems
far worse than an overflowing toilet.


nb


Time for wetwipes, to be discarded in the closed trash can nearby?


]Fahgoodnessake be sure the wet wipes are NOT the kind that clog the
toilet. I used to mistakenly discarded them in the toitie, and
wouldn't you know, it was just when relatives were visiting that it
backed up. Talk about embarrassing!!! They kindly explained my dumb
mistake, and now I keep by the toilet ONLY flushable ones like
Cottonelle Fresh.

An impaired individual of all people must have accessible ONLY the
flushable kind!

HB


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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

On Jun 4, 9:54*am, George wrote:
On 6/1/2011 7:20 AM, Doug Miller wrote:

One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.


Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?


[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]


Sounds like you may be suffering from a low flow toilet that has a poor
design as most did when first implemented and some do now?

If that is the case you may want to replace it with one of the much
better performing models that are available.


Also need to watch out that nobody uses one of the chlorinated
"disinfectant" tablets.
If anybody isn't aware, look for "blue goo" in the Toiletology 101
series.
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

In article , George wrote:
On 6/1/2011 7:20 AM, Doug Miller wrote:
One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.

Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?

[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]


Sounds like you may be suffering from a low flow toilet that has a poor
design as most did when first implemented and some do now?


It's a 3.5-gallon flush.

If that is the case you may want to replace it with one of the much
better performing models that are available.


I'm pretty sure it's user error. The same toilet has been in service for ten
years, and only one person has this problem with it.
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

"Doug Miller" wrote in message
...
In article ,

wrote:
Robert Green wrote:

"Tony Sivori" wrote in message
news Ed Pawlowski wrote:
No easy solution on the timer that I know of. Shutting down the

fill
valve may help.

You're right. Just close the cutoff until produces a trickle that

takes
the desired time to fill the tank. Free, quick, easy, easily
reversible, and effective. A no-brainer.

How does that solution keep too much toilet paper from entering the
bowl?


That wasn't the question the OP asked. The OP asked for a timer or device
to make it take 20 or so minutes to fill the tank.


During which time the clog can break down, or the water in the bowl can
gradually drain away. Or both.


Or neither.

There seems to be an assumption that an Alzheimer's patient would be
like the rest of us - too impatient to wait for the refill. I don't
believe that's the case. From my experience, they would just repeat
flushing over and over again until it flushed. The proof of that
contention? They are already in a near-endless loop with the toilet
paper. Wiping and rewiping, clogging the bowl with toilet paper.
Repetitive actions are one of the hallmarks of dementia.


You raise valid questions. My guess is that the OP hopes to have an
able-minded person on standby with a plunger.


Bingo.


Excellent call. It's by the (intelligent) posing of questions that the real
dimensions of the problem evolve. Excess toilet paper does seem to be the
root cause of the problem, even though the OP did not, which is why I asked
the question I did. I think it's always germane to explore the edges of
potential problems and wish our government did more of it. Turns out that
"walling up" the Mississippi upstream with dams, dikes and levees meant that
the water volume was not being reduced downstream. That normally happens in
upstream flood plains but more and more of them are being close off from the
river. Thus more (and faster and deeper) water is hitting downstream than
ever before. Just an example of unforeseen or unwanted consequences.


The solution would more likely involve a way to *prevent* that much
paper from getting into the bowl in the first place.


I have doubts about that. The only way to truly limit the amount of paper
used would be to limit the amount of paper available. Then, given the
dementia, you could end up with the victim using bare hands and spreading
fecal matter everywhere.


Probably not bare hands. More likely a bath towel.


Either one is NOT a good outcome, but neither is a soaked floor. You could
measure the amount of TP used by unrolling, marking and re-rolling, but only
those who aspire to Asperger's Syndrome would likely go that far. But the
comments about what might happen about limiting TP availability are good
ones. People used to think baby monitors were some newfangled, nonsensical
gadgets without much use but now they're a commodity. I suspect as the
Boomers start down the road to their eventual demise, there will be a lot of
technology applied to situations like this. There have been some really
interesting experiments being done about the elderly and "elder care"
robots. They appear able to seriously help with caring for the elderly
patients, and their capabilities are amazing. Reports say people can become
very attached to them.

I'll start a different thread and post the URLs when I have the time because
I am (obviously) interested in everything possible to keep home life for the
Alzheimer patient as normal as can be while also insuring it's that home
life for others is not seriously affected.


[...]

We just got a lot of floor mats to make accident cleanup easier.


My sincere condolences. Frequent cleanup of toilet overflow is bad

enough,
but repeated soakings of the subfloor and joists will result in
significant damage.


Lots of rubber-backed rugs really kept the flooding damage down. The
behavior *usually* involved one overflush with a very angry, confused and
embarrassed person standing over the mess. It's like all the "joy" of potty
training but worse. Sadly it's very common. Knowing how yucky such
cleanups can be, I'd still be looking for the toilets I see on HGTV that can
flush a bowl full of golf balls knowing that might not solve anything. It
could easily be that the paper just isn't getting wet enough. Do you know,
roughly, how much TP goes in? A little six inch metal machinist's ruler
should be able to give you some rough idea of what you're dealing with.


The OP probably needs to just be happy his relative can still use the
toilet without assistance and find a toilet that can deal with copious
amounts of toilet paper without an overflow.


A good suggestion. This is a lot more expensive than reducing the cut off
valve to a trickle, but the OP might want to consider this clog resistant
toilet:


http://www.americanstandard-us.com/l...vantage/innova
tion
s/?f=2


I'd probably leave that as option 2. IIRC, OP has said no other user clogs,
so the slow refill adjustment *should* buy him something. A chime that
alerts him to when she uses the loo might be very useful in beginning a
monitoring period of heightened alert in case she compensates for the low
flow rate by extending her time in the bathroom. I think we're still
missing some of the parameters of the problem but that they'll emerge via
the ongoing discussion. Is the TP not getting wet enough to go down between
flushes? Is there SO much of it in the bowl that doesn't matter? Does the
OP want to be alerted when she makes her first flush so that he can escort
her out and supervise the rest of the flushing process manually?

We're going to start with cheap toilet paper that (hopefully) will break

down
faster, and turning the shutoff valve nearly off to restrict water flow.

If
that doesn't do the job, then I think the next step is, as you suggest, a
clog-resistant toilet.


Sounds like a good plan of action. I'd also try to figure out the SPP ratio
(Square per Poop) of TP consumed. That's going to be hard behavior to
change, as you note, and it's the process I believe you're most concerned
with interrupting (in the long run, anyway) because she's as clean as she's
going to get (we hope) long before she's finished wiping. As has been
noted, if it's merely repetitive behavior, stopping it midway might not make
any difference. But if she's doing it until she feels clean, then it could
be hands or towels that take over, as noted. That's clearly an unwanted
outcome.

I'd build a small radio transmitter to insert in the TP spool that counted
revolutions and relayed them to my home automation system. After 25 revs,
I'd have a Flood-stop electric valve wired into the TP to prevent refill for
perhaps 10 minute. I'll bet some engineering students could design one.

I also imagine that anyone else using that toilet will probably find
that *they* can't live waiting for minutes for the bowl to refill while
ironically, a person with dementia would just keep wiggling the handle
until it finally flushed. They wouldn't care how much time had passed
because their sense of time has become so distorted from the disease.


Robert is overlooking the fact that anyone *without* cognitive impairments
does not need to wait for the tank to refill, because the rest of us use
appropriate amounts of paper *and* have the sense to not keep flushing an
already-clogged toilet. Think about it, Robert: when you flush the toilet,

do
you stand there waiting for the tank to refill before you leave?


Happened just this morning, in fact. I assume anyone with one of the early
model "low flow" toilets also has the unpleasant experience of having it
clog far more often than the old models. I know I am not the only one that
has to keep a damn plunger next to their low flow toilet!

I'll be very interested to see if setting the valve to fill slowly has any
effect on the problem. I have my doubts simply because the proposed cure,
while a hassle to people without cognitive impairments, probably won't be
much noticed by someone with dementia. They'll just patiently wait for the
tank to refill, or as I mentioned previously keep working the handle until
it does flush.

Surely the process will take longer with the reduced flow, but in my albeit
limited experience, time does not pass for Alzheimer's patients the way they
do for us. My friend Roberto, whose wife had very early onset Alzheimer's,
would sit for hours, removing and then putting on her gloves. He had to
take her to all our computer group meetings, where she sat mostly in
silence, putting her gloves on and taking them off with no apparent concerns
about the passage of time. Even with his vigilance, she managed to slip
away on one occasion and get seriously lost by getting on a bus, thinking
she was going home from work or something like that.

I hope it does work out for you - it's certainly possible. But it sounds
like you've got plans B and C well-thought out, just in case. That, again
is based on very limited experience but by the time most people get
Alzheimer's, the rat-race is over for them and they're usually never in a
hurry to get anywhere. Hence my fear that slowing down the refill process
won't have much effect. But it could give you enough time to intervene
before a small problem because a big, icky one.

The unintended consequence in this case could easily be that by increasing
the time between possible flushes, it allows the patient to time to consume
even more paper. It's all predicated on the reaction of a person who's
losing her ability to think logically. Always a guessing game in the long
run. My dad often surprised me at how easily he defeated mechanisms
designed to help him stay organized. I think, in the long run, patients
will end up wearing GPS enabled communicators with a small eyeglass mounted
videocam. That technology is mostly here already, but it's a little pricey.
Still when you consider NY pays 1.4M a year per kid to keep them in places
where they are sat on and killed, what's a converted cell phone (basically)
cost in comparison? This is why we worked so hard to keep dad out of an
institution:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/ny...-disabled.html

"Yet on a February afternoon in 2007, Jonathan, a skinny, autistic
13-year-old, was asphyxiated, slowly crushed to death in the back seat of a
van by a state employee who had worked nearly 200 hours without a day off
over 15 days. The employee, a ninth-grade dropout with a criminal conviction
for selling marijuana, had been on duty during at least one previous episode
of alleged abuse involving Jonathan."

I'm betting that audits of places like this can save the taxpayers billions
of dollars because if it's happening in NY, it's probably happening
everywhere. $1.4M a year to end up choked to death.

--
Bobby G.


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"SMS" wrote in message
...
On 6/1/2011 12:39 PM, mike wrote:

You can buy a bidet seat from Toto. No toilet paper, no problem. It
does require some wiring. You might also look at getting a Toto Drake
toilet while you're at it, if you don't already have a clog-resistant
toilet.


We have three Toto Drake toilets. All clog on a regular basis when too
much paper is used.


Is it too much paper or that the paper doesn't get wet enough to flush
properly? Now that I think about it, all the videos I've seen of
high-powered toilets were flushing golf bowls. Toilet paper flushing
mechanics have to be substantially different than those of golf bowl
flushing.

Might even be time to consult a toilet manufacturer because I assume they
know something about flushability.

Might even consider a deliberately leaky toilet that opens the valve
slightly when someone's sitting on it so that a steady trickle of water
comes down the rim of the bowl, helping to wet down the TP that's already in
there to make it more flushable.

--
Bobby G.


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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

Doug Miller wrote the following:
One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.

Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?

[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]



Bidet!

--

Bill
In Hamptonburgh, NY
In the original Orange County. Est. 1683
To email, remove the double zeroes after @


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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

In article , willshak wrote:
Doug Miller wrote the following:
One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning up.

Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?

[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]



Bidet!

Are you serious? Honestly -- how practical do you think it is to try to teach
an 87 year old with Alzheimer's to use a bidet?
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Default Timer valve to delay toilet refill?

"Doug Miller" wrote in message
...
In article , willshak

wrote:
Doug Miller wrote the following:
One person[*] in our household will from time to time use too much

paper,
clogging the toilet -- and then flush it two or three times, with the
predictable result, which the rest of us are getting tired of cleaning

up.

Is there some sort of timer valve available, that would prevent the

toilet
tank from refilling for, say, fifteen or twenty minutes after a flush?

[* -- this is an 87 year old with Alzheimer's; while education is

obviously
the most desirable solution, it equally obviously ain't gonna happen]



Bidet!

Are you serious? Honestly -- how practical do you think it is to try to

teach
an 87 year old with Alzheimer's to use a bidet?


Or anything new.

Dad was forgetting stuff at a prodigious rate. I don't know whether your
relative is following the same track but little by little, things just
slipped away from him but no new information was retained. I can only
imagine how upset a bidet would have made him because he did seem to take
comfort in the routine of things. Even if we told him about it and showed
him how it worked, odds are he would have had a heart attack, a stroke or
fallen off the toilet and fractured his skull when the water jet hit his
butt.

FWIW, I had to plunge the toilet twice since this thread began and I can
only wonder what someone with severe Alzheimer's would react to a plugged
toilet. It's obvious - they would just flush again thinking/hoping/??? that
it would clear on the second flush.

Have you "trimmed" the toilet valve yet? I hope the reduced flow solution
works out for you. My dad passed before things got substantially
orse. )-: It's been a pretty depressing thread (not your fault) for me,
remembering the past and considering what the future holds in store.

--
Bobby G.


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