Barge Date:  04-11-2018

The Curse of the Toilet

Just a note of usage on this blog that might be useful to some of you. Yes, you can make comments and ask questions. You do this by looking at the bottom of each post for the not so obvious "no comments" (or just "comments" if someone has already made a comment) line that Google gives us. If you will click on this it will take you to a posting page where you can write to your heart's content. I will receive notice that you have posted. Now onto important things.

I am getting a little ahead of myself as I like to do things in the order in which events occur. But this post is perhaps just curious and may be of interest to others as the state of the toilets on the boat is once again examined.

Heard my guests having some trouble with the electric toilet. This has happened before and from those experiences I brought with me this year a suitable plumber's snake that will work on the plastic pipes of the toilets. So grabbing the trusty tool and disconnecting a fitting we tried to get the snake to go up the pipe. And it did, for a short distance and then progress was stopped where there is a U in the line that is needed to prevent water being siphoned into the bowl and flooding the boat.

So to get around the U-shaped anti-siphon part. I removed the wall and disconnected another part of the hose and was able to get the snake all the way out of the boat. Reconnected everything and still  no water was entering the toilet.

It is when I once again disconnected a pipe at the anti-siphon part that I noticed green crud  hanging out of this part. I removed the U  and gave this to my shipmate to clean out the crud at the sink. It wasn’t algae but rather this cute little catfish that you see pictured. Just by chance, the poor little guy was up in the tube when someone attempted to draw water. He made it up to this turn and no further. He probably took a number of pokes from my plumber's snake or at least we think he might. He arrived in our sink dead.

Just one more way the toilets can interfere with your workflow.