Our new toilet

We got a new, low flow toilet this week. Although I'm always trying to make improvements to our resource use, I am very leery of low flow toilets. My parents were the original water conservationists in my life, and they always replaced their toilets with low flow. The things were much smaller and more space-aged looking back in the 80's, but they weren't the greatest feats of engineering in my opinion. It tended to take two flushes to get things down, and some things just wouldn't budge with the small amount of force and shallow bowl angle of those toilets. My sister developed an entire system of getting difficult deposits to go down the drain. Avoiding the gory details, I'll just say it involved going outside to get a stick and having another person turn the water valve at the wall on and off with just the right timing. The long and short of it was that I don't think we ended up saving water. We probably used more.

So, here we are in 2010. The world is finally figuring out that we need to slow down on our resource use, or at least slow down on the money we spend on resources, and new an improved technology is emerging to help us with this. Enter, our new toilet. It's made by Glacier Bay. We bought it at Home Depot for $98. The box includes the bowl, tank, seat and even the wax ring. We just took it home and installed it. So, the cool thing is that the tank doesn't actually fill. I'm happy for this not only because I think it saves water, but because maybe the tank won't get so icky inside. Instead, there is a sort of bucket at the top of the tank that collects the water. When it is flushed, the bucket dumps the water from this high position, creating the force it needs to flush things down. The height of the seat is also 3" taller than other toilets, so the angle at which things go down is less steep. Yay. Good engineering. So far so good. I'll let you know how it goes.