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In With the New Out With the Old...Toilet
January 23, 2012 | Water Efficiency, Water Supply, Greening Water Infrastructure, Clean Water, Global Warming, Innovative Water Management
Peter Raabe
North Carolina Conservation Director
This fall I was committed to renovating my old 1980’s style bathroom. Now that it is done my wife and I disagree a bit about what the coolest feature of the new bathroom is, she likes the claw foot bathtub, but I am excited about the toilet. Yeah, the toilet.
Anyone who works in water supply policy or infrastructure will sooner or later come down to a conversation about toilets- they are our urban water hogs, just sitting in our bathrooms using way too much pure drinking water each year.
The EPA has developed a certification- WaterSense - that easily allows you to identify some of the most water efficient toilets available.
The typical toilet these days uses about 1.6 gallons of pure drinking water quality water per flush- the real water hogs use 3.5 gallons per flush. A WaterSense toilet will use at most 1.28 gallons per flush, which is a nice water savings compared to the old models.
Now there is a new wave of toilets out there- ‘Ultra High Efficiency' – and being a toilet geek I was drawn to one of those because it uses only 0.8 gallons per flush! (Definitely check out an example video).
The best thing about the whole process of buying and installing a new toilet- I live in a community that has a toilet rebate. It is worth it to the water utility because as we reduce our water use, it reduces wear and tear on the utility’s infrastructure and adds to the overall water supply of the system by reducing overall demand. It is a win all the way around.
Check out your toilet and if you are using an old water hog- look into updating it with a WaterSense labeled toilet… make it a simple New Year’s Resolution!
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Comments List
Submitted by Chas at: January 23, 2012
Ultra-low flow toilets are great, but during recent travels, I was surprised to learn that in some cultures it is considered normal to flush a toilet before you use the bathroom, they flush it again before they use toilet paper, and then one more time to flush toilet paper. I couldn't believe it. I noticed each person from that particular country doing the same behavior. When I brought up water conservation (not in reference to their bathroom behavior), they indicated that water conservation is not important because they don't live in a desert... Ugh. With all of the technology, there is still going to be a lot of work. Oh yes, the above was taking place at a special workshop for "future leaders in sustainability".