Low flow toilets and old houses February 28, 2007
A relative of mine just replaced the old high-flow toilets in all 5 units of his building with low flow toilets. The result: a water bill that is $100 a month lower - the replacements should pay for themselves in six months. The toilet of choice: Toto Drake. It’s approximately $200 and it gets rave reviews on the internet.
I live in an old house (1908) with the requisite sloping floors and rusty iron pipes that come along with it. We already have low flow toilets (usually excellent Sloan Flushmates) which were purchased on Consumer Reports rave reviews. See the second rave review above - the only toilet they liked better than the Toto has a flushmate system. HOWEVER! Consumer Reports clearly does not have an old house that has charmingly rust-flecked, low pressure water. See, the Flushmate system works by storing up pressure from the pipes in a sealed tank and uses that pressure to forcefully push water out when you flush. There is no need to rely on gravity to move water through Flushmate toilets, although there are no mentions of them being used in space on the internet. When you put one of these suckers in a house with rusty pipes, little bits of rust get into the workings of the tank and the flushes get progressively worse over time until you’re left with a toilet that pushes the tank water down about a half inch on the flush and then gurgles at you. When this happened, I found myself cussing (a lot) at an inanimate object.
So last Thursday I found myself doing a midnight toilet installation of a Toto Drake. It comes with excellent instructions which should be supplemented by these instructions. And now that it’s done, I very highly recommend it. In fact it’s amazing. For decency’s sake, I will not go into further details.
The moral of the story:
- New house? Get a Flushmate
- Old house? Get a Toto Drake
- Hate money? Keep your high flow toilet
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Article Tags>> construction | remodel | toilet
- Posted in : General Real Estate
- Author : Galen
Comments»
I also highly recommend the Drake for commercial use - we replaced both toilets at the bar with Drakes since our water bills were astronomical. Result - water bills $1,000 lower - per month!! We kick ourselves for not doing it sooner, but we had a guy from the city utilities AND a plumber come out and tell us everything was fine. Apparently, not so much. Thank god for the internet - helped us find an honest plumber too!
We LOVE our Toto Toilet we had to install in our 1928 year old home. I like that the lid closes automatically…no more barking at the boys in our house.
Dang, there goes… no pun intended the Northern black market!
Homer: (gasps) “They’re years ahead of us in toilet technology! ”
For a few bucks more, you can get a Toto DualMax, which uses only .9 gal for liquid waste. Have one - works great.
Shane, that’s true - why would you drive to Canada to buy a high flow toilet unless you liked watching the water slowly spin around before going down?
Bert, that sounds very cool, although I like the simplicity of a single choice with toilets. Does it have a “#1″ button and a “#2″ button so guests know what to push?
Good advice, and I’ll add my $.02 regarding the pressure-assisted toilets (such as the one you removed) for those unfamiliar with them.
Regardless of what the reviews say, they are LOUD–think jet engine flying over loud (or at least seems that way, in the echo chamber known as the bathroom). Having the lid (not just the seat) down helps quite a bit, but still much louder than ‘conventional’ toilets of any flow amount.
So if you have a bathroom off of the bedroom, or one in the hallway which is surrounded by bedrooms, and somebody is using the toilet while others are sleeping, you may want to go with a simple gravity-flow style (where you can remove the tank lid and see the water level and not what appears to be a plastic submarine or miniature beer keg, as seen in the pressure-assist toilets).
That’s my only gripe about these toilets–other than the noise, they flush great. Have not had the experience that you did–maybe the accumulator inside the tank on your old one filled up with rust flakes and stopped working.
[...] I haven’t had to replace a toilet, but if I one day do, I’ll be heeding Galen from Rain City Guide’s advice on low flows for older homes: Low flow toilets and old houses Consumer Reports clearly does not have an old house that has charmingly rust-flecked, low pressure water. See, the Flushmate system works by storing up pressure from the pipes in a sealed tank and uses that pressure to forcefully push water out when you flush. There is no need to rely on gravity to move water through Flushmate toilets, although there are no mentions of them being used in space on the internet. When you put one of these suckers in a house with rusty pipes . . . [...]
Galen -
> Does it have a “#1″ button and a “#2″ button so guests know what to push?
It has a large chrome button on the top that is divided into two segments, a large one and a small one.
I’ll have to check and see if there is any explicit instructions on the buttons (doubt it).