Broken toilet pan - how easy is it to replace?

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Our delightful cleaner accidentally broke one of our toilet pans today. Ours is a fairly modern house and the suites will be around 10 years old. The sinks and baths are marked Twyford but the toilet pans aren't marked at all. The broken pan is a back-to-the-wall, floor-mounted one and the cistern is boxed in to a built-in cupboard behind it. Standard modern house, low-unit-cost stuff.

No idea how to identify the toilet pan so I can buy an identical replacement, so can I just buy any alternative we like the look of? Do the outlet and fill pipes always have the same position and dimensions for mainstream pans? Or do I need to measure the existing pipes and somehow find a matching pan?

Would appreciate any help!

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Thanks all. I'm not too worried about the flooring because it's not tiled. I can fix a footprint issue with new lino if I need to. Unfortunately there's no sign of an identical pan on the Twyford website.

Maybe I should remove the broken pan and see how much access I have to the pipes if i need to adjust them. Is the outlet pipe relatively fixed, usually?

Hadn't thought about claiming on household insurance, but I guess I could. The cleaner has offered to pay but it seems like it was a genuine mistake and she's not exactly overflowing with money. Ho hum.

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WinstonWolf said:

Can you post a pic of the pan

Good idea!



Like I say, I think it's a Twyford suite in there but the pan has no markings on it. Would be about 10-12 years old.

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Spudler said:

Looks bog standard to me.

Super Slo Mo said:

What I'd be inclined to do is go down to your local independent bathroom supplier/plumber's merchant, with that photo, and see if they can identify it.
...
You might just drop on something. Whereabouts in the UK are you?

A colleague just suggested the very same thing. Last night I was googling to find it but couldn't, so started to assume it was a pointless exercise.
I'm in Sussex.

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There's a hole in the front of the pan that I can put my fist through and a big crack running about half the circumference of the pan just under the rim. It might be fixable but I wouldn't want to put my weight on it ever again.

A big glass bottle of bubble bath (one of those pointless decorative dust collectors that everybody's wife has somewhere) was knocked off the windowsill straight into the pan. Only pity is that the bubble bath bottle didn't itself break.

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BristolRich said:

Thats a Twyfords "Refresh" Back to Wall Pan...

Thanks, but I don't think it's identical
The one you linked to has a lip around the outside of the rim, about 2" down from the top surface, which ours doesn't. It's very similar though so maybe it'll be close enough. I need to take the broken one off and measure its key dimensions.

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It did occur to me to take the identical pan from our en suite and move it into the main bathroom... but I just know if I do that my wife is going to say, "Well, darling if we're fitting a new style of loo then perhaps we could remodel the whole en suite?" £5k later and our cleaner's little mistake becomes a bit of an issue.

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RichB said:

I think that's because it doesn't go flush.

I see what you did there.

Yeah, the pan backs onto a cupboard/unit that contains the cistern and whoever fitted it out had to use a piece of plastic trim to bridge the gap at the bottom. Builders, eh?