Quarter Turn Valves

It always surprises me how often it's the small details that avert disaster. In order to really appreciate this, you need to understand how a toilet fills after you flush. In a normal flush, the water from the tank is released into the bowl by the flapper carrying the contents of the bowl and the tank out the bottom and away. When the water in the tank goes down the fill valve opens. The fill valve sends water two places, and this has great consequences. The first, and most obvious place, is into the tank to fill it back up for the next flush. The second is into the bowl to fill it back up to catch the next load. This is all nothing more than a simple curiosity about how the objects in your daily life work, unless of course they stop working. When you push down that handle and release a torrent of water into the bowl, things need to go somewhere. If nothing is moving on down the pipe, you have a whole lot of water trying to occupy the bowl at the same time. This is where your 1/4 turn valve comes into play.

1/4 turn valve, averter of tragedy.

A curious fact about toilets is that they can pretty much all take the regular volume of the bowl and the volume of a flush without overflowing. Barely. Where you get into trouble is with the toilet trying to put that little bit of extra water in the bowl as it fills the tank. This is why, when you're standing watching very bad things float ever higher, the water level continues to rise for a minute no matter how much you beg it to stop. I just did a check on my toilet, I pulled the line that fills the bowl and directed it into a water jug and flushed. My toilet sends just shy of one gallon to the bowl during a fill (almost comically, I was using a one gallon jug to measure and was kind of freaking out as it almost overflowed during the test) One gallon isn't a lot of water, unless it's flowing over the top edge of a toilet bowl that is clogged with things that you really don't want to have to think about cleaning up off the floor. Then all of a sudden, it's a LOT.
That's why when my kids yell from the bathroom "Daddy! There's a problem!" I don't even take the time to figure out whether things are going to come over the top or not. I just dive for the valve and shut off the water. With a standard valve you have to turn turn turn turn turn, oh my god! turn turn turn it's off. Maybe you were quick enough. Maybe not. With a 1/4 turn valve, you just grab and give a quick twist and it's over. Sure, you've still got a clog of god knows what do deal with, but at least you don't have to stand around in socks wet with god knows what while you deal with it. If a 1/4 turn valve saves you just once, it's worth it. It you're like me and live in a house with six people and one toilet that gets hard use, it's worth it's weight in gold.