The Plan

Our immediate action plan to save over 20,000 gallons of water per year is as simple as replacing our two old, inefficient toilets with new high efficiency toilets (HET’s). For our own home, we will purchase a Toto Aquia dual flush HET pictured above to replace the existing 3.5 gpf model. The Toto Aquia uses 1.6 gpf to flush solids, 0.9 gpf for liquids. At our rental property where our other offending 3.5 gpf toilet resides, we will go with a 1.28 gpf Toto EcoDrake HET.

For disposal, we’ll take the 3.5 gpf toilets to ReSource to take advantage of a great City of Fort Collins toilet recycling program under which old toilets are collected, crushed and incorporated into road base at no cost to the homeowner to keep them out of the landfill.

Selecting a High Efficiency Toilet

We discovered that researching and deciding which HET to purchase can be a bit overwhelming. Following the four simple steps below will help you keep this process manageable.

1. Start with the EPA’s list of WaterSense® labeled high efficiency toilets. The HET’s on this list have been certified to meet performance criteria developed by the EPA.  Be forewarned, this list is long, with nearly three dozen toilet brands and many models per brand.

2. Develop a short list of HET prospects for further scrutiny. You can do this quickly by using the web to check out prices, styles and colors for the various models on WaterSense® list.

3. Consult the experts to help you make a final decision. Like Step 2, this is easy to accomplish on line by searching for reviews on makes/models on your short list, or you can ask a trusted plumber or green builder you know in your area. We found this site from plumber Terry Love to be particularly helpful.

4. Purchase with eyes wide open. Toilet tanks and bowls are often sold separately. Also, seats and lids are typically not included with the tank and bowl. Some manufacturers do not provide warranty coverage for products purchased over the internet. And then there are some e-tailers who offer attractive prices and promote “free shipping”. Look closely…we found one such claim where shipping was indeed free, but “freight charges” were significant! Finally, be sure to look for incentives, rebates and eco-friendly disposal programs. This is as simple as checking your municipality’s web site.

Here’s how our selection process played out…

Steps 1 and 2 – We quickly shortlisted to three prospects; Toto, Caroma and Kohler. Toto and Caroma made the list because we were aware of them as manufacturers from countries that have long been focused on toilet water conservation (Japan and Australia, respectively) with relatively long track records of HET production. Kohler made our short list simply due to brand name recognition.

Step 3 – Our situation quickly became a Toto vs. Caroma showdown after we discovered several online stories about serious problems with Kohler’s performance, poor customer service and high replacement part costs related to their HET’s. We started leaning toward Toto over Caroma because we liked the styling better, and Maximum Performance Testing (MaP) ratings favored Toto for the models we were comparing (click here to learn more about MaP testing). This thread from Terry Love’s website sealed the deal in favor of Toto. We chose their dual flush Aquia for our own home to maximize water savings, and decided that their EcoDrake was a better choice for our rental property due to ease of operation and lower price point.

Step 4 – We decided to purchase our toilets at Green Logic because we prefer to work with other green-minded local businesses and keep more of the dollars we spend in our community. We are also comforted by the idea that we have someone we can turn to for support with future parts or warranty needs, should they arise.

Flushing Factoid

According to the EPA, if every American home with older, inefficient toilets replaced them with new WaterSense® labeled toilets, we would save nearly 640 billion gallons of water per year, equal to more than two weeks of flow over Niagara Falls!

Are the toilets in your home a part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Before we get into the details of the model, let’s look at the two general options we will be evaluating with it – displacement and replacement.

Displacement

Displacing water in your toilet’s tank is an easy, low-cost way to start saving water immediately.  You can accomplish this by using a product specifically manufactured for this purpose, like the “Toilet Tank Bank” depicted above, which saves 0.8 gallons per flush.  You can also employ a used plastic beverage bottle filled with sand or gravel to keep it submerged in the tank.  Or, as a friend said in a comment about my Facebook feed of Part 1 of this series…”I remember an ecology module in the 6^th grade suggested putting a brick in the tank for water displacement”.   Yup, that can work too.

Upcycling plastic bottles or bricks is definitely a green, no-cost way to go.  However, we think the Toilet Tank Bank is the better approach.  Practically speaking, it will take a challenging combination of bottles or bricks to equal or exceed the tank bank’s 0.8 gpf of displacement.  This could interfere with the toilet’s flapper function, causing leaking that far offsets any savings achieved. 

The Toilet Tank Bank will cost you about $2.  It is readily available from a wide range of e-tailers.  Watch the shipping charges…maybe you can add a low-flow showerhead or other water-conserving item to your order to reach the minimum purchase amount for free shipping and achieve goodness all the way around.

Replacement

From a water conservation perspective, toilets can be classified as good, better and best.  Efficient toilets labeled 1.6 gpf / 6.0 lpf are good compared to their 3.5 to 7.0 gpf predecessors.  High Efficiency Toilets, or HET’s, offer 20% better conservation at 1.28 gpf.  And Dual Flush HET’s offer the best water conservation with a 1.28 gpf flush option for solids, and a 0.8 gpf option for liquids. 

The Model

We’ve modeled some mitigation scenarios for the two 3.5 gpf toilets at our Sunset Avenue and Buckeye Street properties (see the figure below for scenarios and results).  If you have a Google account and would like to access this tool for your own scenario testing, just click on the figure to access it in Google Docs spreadsheet format.  Please be sure to follow the instructions in red that tell you how to save a copy before modifying the spreadsheet.  If you don’t have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up (self explanatory at www.google.com). 

Any difficulties? Contact us and we’ll get the spreadsheet to you by email.

If you are motivated to save as much water as possible, and you can afford to spend $300 or more per toilet, you should give serious consideration to a dual flush model.  As the spreadsheet shows, installing a dual flush high efficiency toilet will reduce the annual water consumption at our Buckeye Street residence by over 9,500 gallons.  This is almost 28% of our household’s total water consumption of 34,500 gallons per year! 

If cost and payback period considerations trump maximizing water conservation in your mind, and your inefficient toilet looks and works fine, a Toilet Tank Bank is a good mitigation option.  We installed one in the toilet in our home immediately after measuring its 3.5 gpf water consumption.  This simple, low-cost effort will reduce our average monthly household water consumption by 8% from approximately 3,000 gallons per month to 2,760 until we can research, decide upon and install a high efficiency toilet.

If you are planning to replace your toilet anyway and are pondering toilets of differing efficiency, you can use this model to do a comparative analysis.  Input the less efficient of the two toilets to be compared as “existing toilet data”, input the more efficient as “modified or new toilet data”, and input the difference in cost as “cost to modify or buy new toilet”.  The resulting calculations will tell you the comparative savings and payback period for choosing the more efficient toilet.

OK, enough toilet talk for this installment.  We hope you will tune in to Part 4 where we’ll summarize our research into specific models of high efficiency toilets, and tell you what the plan is for replacing our 3.5 gpf toilets.