Question

You're going to laugh at this one but my curiosity is sky on this. Recently in our apartment building they replaced all the toilets with "Water Saving Toilets". I opened it up and flushed it to see if I could see a difference and to me it seemed to work the same as the old one. I give up - what's different about an "Water Saving Toilet" from a regular one?

Answer

It is true -- many cities are in the middle of a massive drive to replace older toilets with new water-saving models. Here's why...

A family of four can consume something like 300 to 400 gallons of water per day on things like bathing, cooking, drinking, laundry and dish washing. Old toilets use about 5 gallons (20 liters) per flush. When you consider that a normal person flushes a toilet 7 or so times a day, you can see that a family of 4 consumes more than 140 gallons per day by flushing alone. Depending on the article you are reading, the water consumption of toilets represents between 30% to 50% of the water consumed by a household each day.

The new toilets installed in your apartment use 1.6 gallons (6 liters) per flush. If you replace those 5-gallon-per-flush toilets with 1.6-gallon-per-flush toilets, you save a huge amount of water - something like 100 gallons per day per household. For a city, a big reduction like that means that you can delay both the construction of new reservoirs and new sewage treatment plants - That's a huge incentive to replace all the toilets!

Here are some interesting links:

• How Toilets Work
• How Sewer Systems and Septic Tanks Work
• Ultra Low Flush Toilet FAQ
• The Owner's Guide on Purchasing Low-Consumption Toilets and Toilet Replacement
• The toilet
• Water consumption

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