The Toilet – what would your bathroom be without one?

You don’t really think about them too much except when you’re in a hurry to use one. But what happens if your toilet needs to be replaced? What if your toilet isn’t working the way it should be? If so, then now is the perfect time to devote a few minutes of your life to toilets.

The standard toilet has water rushing down from a tank above the seat to flush away waste. There was really nothing wrong with it except for the occasional clogging or broken flush mechanism. Things became interesting though when the US government decided that people were using too much water to flush their toilets. Now, toilets have a maximum 1.6 gallon flush rule. If your toilet isn’t made right, the 1.6 gallons of flush water won’t be enough to do its job properly. Because of the rule, several new developments in toilet design came about to address the water efficiency issue.

As mentioned above, the standard toilet flush system is the gravity flush. The 1.6 gallon rule affected the construction of this toilet with the widening of trap ways and flush valves from 2 inches to 3 inches. A glaze coating is also applied to trap ways to reduce friction.

Another flush system being used is air pressure-assisted flush systems. This kind of toilet uses the air in the water tank to add pressure to the water as it is being transported to the toilet bowl. These toilets emit more noise than the standard gravity flush system.

There are electrically assisted flush systems in use with a small motor installed to give instant water pressure. The motor normally has less than a half horsepower for pressurizing the water.

In Australia, toilet design improved on the gravity assist flush system by introducing a dual flush selector. With this function, you can choose to use only half a tank of water to flush the toilet or, press the other button to use up the full 1.6 gallon tank of water. They also improved the flush by having the water push the waste in front of it. Traditional flush systems just let the waste travel along with the flow of water.