Are you sure all that humidity is coming from the outside? It looks like a really weird spot for that to happen

I did not post a pic of the whole facade, but to the right of the plant is an overhang that prevents water from getting on the facade. This section has no overhang so rainwater runs down the facade. A few years ago part of the facade was cracking and I re-rendered that part of the facade. After a rain, the new part of the facade remains bright in color which indicates water does not penetrate. But in the bad area, the gray surface becomes notably darker, which suggests water is penetrating.

Why can’t you access the upper floor? Is this an apartment building and someone else lives above you?

I have access to the whole house. The interior pics are of the top floor. What I meant by not accessing the top of the beam is just that the ceiling is in the way. I could remove the drywall on the ceiling corner to get access to more of the beam. I will first dig up the exterior facade and see if that exposes the top of the beam. If not, then I would remove a bit of the ceiling.

What’s in the black tube?

I’m not sure what you are referring to. My exteriour pic is terrible (bad camera). On the interior pic, there is a grey cable, probably a/c to the ceiling light. The blackness to the left of that is not a tube but simply a missing brick. It had plaster and insulation foam before I got to it. But now it is just a hole. If you mean the exterior, it’s just a terrible pic. Above the plant is a wood panel that is really warped from getting wet. I installed it new a few years ago but got something wrong. It may not have been treated wood, I don’t recall. I thought painting it would be sufficient but clearly not in the section that has no overhang.

Perhaps you have already checked, but I’d try to rule out any infiltration coming from above, otherwise it will keep happening and it could get worse.

I will know more after I dig up the facade. But note that the roof is right above and just to the right of the plant (off picture) is the downspout. It’s clear, but I suppose I have to wonder if it’s possible that water puddles at a bottleneck right where the downspout is.

The American wax ring designs seem like a good candidate for crappy design post in one of these places:

!asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net
!crappydesign@discuss.tchncs.de

Floor-mounted toilets in the EU put their outflow out the back of the toiletbowl parallel to the floor, not below the bowl into the floor. Even if you have a bad mount that causes the toilet to wobble, it won’t leak. But if it did leak, it would be trivially detectable.

Is the US design putting cosmetics above function? Is it that they want to hide the sewer pipe entirely? I suppose if I were installing a toilet in the US, I would look for a wall-hung toilet. But another comment suggests those are rare in the US too.

pure silicone, the clear stuff that smells like vinegar

I believe the stuff that smells like vinegar is special sanitary caulk for bathrooms which comes with anti-fungal properties. Pure silicone is odorless, not for bathroom use, IIUC.

American wood frame stucco.

To be clear, if I do the work myself, I would likely renovate the existing problematic bathroom. I would try to do a curbless design out of concrete or a wedi kit, but I am not sure yet if I have enough area for curbless. I would add a shoulder height wall and try to avoid having a door or curtains for the shower stall.

If I hire a contractor, I guess I will consider the house extension since the costs are crazy anyway, in which case I would simply abandon the existing shower until I figure out later what to do with it.

Would love to find a strong lanyard that uses kevlar/aramid for the string. I use one for keys and the string breaks every 18 months or so.

I have no interest myself, but if I wanted a home assistent I would take an Amazon Echo (either from a dumpster, or 2nd-hand), and put lineageOS on it to liberate it. The more Amazon hardware that gets converted to a liberated platform, the better. People have done this successfully with the Echoes that have a screen, but the headless Echoes need the same motivation and effort so we can liberate those too. Otherwise they are going to waste.

Depending on your location, you would have to balance storage amount to last between rains, and as the storage gets bigger it gets extremely heavy. (A 50 gal drum of water is over 400 lbs, or ~190kg) A pump you have to service/replace every few years is way easier to deal with than trying to set up a structure to safely hold hundreds of kilos/pounds over your head in a place where leaks could mean heavy water damage to the house.

There are small 50 liter hot water tanks that hang on the wall. There are just two bolts going into brick. When I first saw that, I was suprised that it was safe to do but it is in fact how they are meant to be installed. I think these are even bigger than 50L:

If someone is uncomfortable with the factory design, there is this aftermarket mounting system that uses 4 bolts:

People throw away hot water tanks like this all the time, which I thought could be repurposed for rain harvesting. All my cisterns have two inputs, left and right, depending on where the pipework is. And they are already connected to tap water with a valve. So I could easily pipe rain water to the unused cistern input and turn off the tap valve, and turn the tap valve on if the reservoir is empty. I guess gravity fed water would be slow to fill, but probably fast enough if there aren’t many users.

I was thinking I could cut a hole in the top of an old tank for the input then on the top side have an overflow hole near the top that feeds the downspout.

Indeed I do the same. Clean acid to descale kitchen appliances, usually muliple times. Then that gets recycled for dirty (bathroom) jobs. Though the kettle cleaning acids tend to be weak, I think. Vinegar is not potent enough for tough jobs. And I probably would not try hydrochloric acid in metal kettles.

I wonder if it makes sense to mix recycled vinegar with hydrochloric acid in a toilet – or whether that’s playing with fire.

Citric acid is less commonly available, but since you say it can work in metal kettles and also the toilet, it piques my interest… I’ll have to consider tracking some down.

This sounds interesting. It makes me wonder why no cisterns already have built-in softeners.

OTOH, if I am willing to accept the extra home improvement effort and complexity anyway, I wonder if I am better off harvesting rainwater, which I presume is soft water. A friend does this. After flushing, we hear a pump turn on to pump water from the rain reservoir to the cistern. A pump does not appeal to me, but I wonder if I could do a ceiling mounted reservoir on the top floor and then rely on gravity to feed the cisterns.

The outlet probably turns outward, so it’s not just vertical movement.

Ah, I did not think of that. So I need to scrap the idea of a rigid pipe going into a rubber bushing. I guess an accordian pipe would be the viable cheap hack, apart from some way to add support just around the drain.

Maybe there was some kind of metal support that got left out during installation?

The toilet fell through the floor at one point because (I’m told) the house flippers neglected to use backer board wherever they layed tiles (kitchen and bathroom).

well, not sure how that helps. When the showerpan flexes, the drain still moves. And if the drain is an elbow fitting, I would think it’s harder to manage the movement when it’s a horizontal pipe moving vertically. The accordian pipe should work with that, but if the drain is vertical then I think i have a choice between accordian piping or rigid.

Nonetheless, thanks for the suggestion.

(update) someone mentioned that the drain is probably not moving only vertically… it would be moving outward, both vertically and horizontally. So apparently a hack would need to use an accordian style pipe.

no, I have never maintained a pool so I don’t know anything about that. Though someone mentioned there is some kind of material in a brick form that goes in the cistern. Not sure if that does the same thing.

I have seen those blocks of something that go either in the cistern or hang under the rim. I was never quite sure if they were for aroma, disinfecting, or if they did something to control limescale.

I don’t suppose they would all be created equal. Guess I need to look into it.

That was one of my questions. I am looking for min effort. If a quick brushing simply prevents the limescale, that would be less time and effort. But if limescale would still build up anyway, then I would not be interested as it would just add to the big effort every few yrs.

Brick acid may be hydrochloric acid.

Ah, that reminds me… I do tell guests when a party is getting a bit edgy to obviously do their vomiting in the toilet, but to not flush since vomit is rich in hydrochloric acid… to just leave it there to work on the scaling. I guess it doesn’t happen enough.

Water softeners are a bit of a double edged sword. They solve the limescale problem but then soft water is more conducive to corrosion in appliances like hot water tanks. I guess I would not run a soft water circuit just for toilets. OTOH, a friend has a rain water harvesting tank which feeds the cisterns. I suppose that’s not just a water savings but probably solves the limescale issue.