I’m one those people who was brought up to respect the value of
things. Put a different way, it’s hard for me to get rid of something
if it still works. I drive my cars until they die. I use my
appliances as long as they still work. Etc.

When I visit friends houses, I am often struck by how new much of
their things seem. Take stoves, for instance. It seems like all the
homeowners I know have stoves that are less than 15 years old, and
they have all these crazy features that mine doesn’t have. Mine must
be 40 years old or so. It’s very simple. It’s a gas range, my
biggest complaint about it is that it’s hard to adjust the flame
without having it go out. But, it works, I cook on it happily, and I
just don’t think that spending $500 on a new stove would bring me $500
of happiness. So, I don’t.

Refrigerator, same thing. I’m sure there are other examples, but
really, that’s not the point here. The point is: why is everyone
using such old toilets?

Toilets can cause a homeowner a great deal of frustration. For instance, no one
likes cleaning toilets. Sometimes, the chain inside can get tangled,
and then it just wastes water. Same thing happens if the flap doesn’t
cover the hole. Sometimes you have to jiggle the handle or they won’t
shut off. Sometimes they don’t flush on the first try. Sometimes you
have to hold the handle down for a few seconds or it won’t flush.

And, even at their best, most older toilets use several gallons of
water every time they are flushed. For most households, I suspect
toilets consume more water than any other single resource. This, of
course, is what inspired the federal government’s infamous regulation
of 1.6 gallons per flush. This has made many many people angry,
because lots of those toilets won’t reliably flush. So, you hear all of these stories
about people traveling to Canada just to buy a toilet because they
don’t have the regulation there. I don’t know how many people really
do that, but I sure hear stories about it.

Well, after months of being frustrated that I had to hold down the
handle of my old (~4 gpf) toilet to get it to flush all the way, I
decided to replace the entire flushing mechanism in hopes that it’d
work better. This was a pretty involved project for a rank amateur
do-it-yourselfer like me. I had to remove the tank from the bowl,
unscrew bolts most of us would rather never think about, and put the
whole thing back together, knowing that if I over-tighten a bolt it
could crack the porcelain, and then where would I be?

It went pretty well, though. And it did help my problem. Most of the
time, when I flushed it, it actually flushed, and it was even more
reliable about turning itself off. So, good, I guess that was an
improvement.

Some time after that, though, the toilet struck back. I noticed one
day that the carpet around the toilet was damp. Woah, bad. Like,
yeah, bad, like, we don’t want to think about bad. Ewww. I will say
that I did not notice a terrible odor or anything. Furthermore, I had
just been doing an unrelated job nearby (working on my selzer maker),
and wondered if I had just spilled a bunch of water in that process.
Yeah, that’s very believable, I wasn’t very careful. That must be
it. Sure enough, a few days later, the carpet was dry, I figured I
was in the clear.

But, no, a few weeks after that, the carpet was damp again. My toilet
is near my shower, and the bathtub and sink aren’t far away, so I
figured there could be a number of places that this water could be
coming from. I cut away a stupid piece of trim board so that I could
examine the pipes. They were all dry. Where was this water coming
from? And why did it only leak once in a while?

Things were fine and dry for several more weeks, but then, while my
parents were visiting once, it happened again. My parents are
unbelievably good to me when it comes to helping with homeowner
tasks. My dad was gracious enough to investigate. They both became
convinced that the problem was that the wax seal that joins the bowl
to the hole in the floor must have gone bad. “Uh, that would mean
that this water was, uh, soiled.” yup. ICK ICK ICK!! I mean, I
would think that if that were the case, then the smell would be
unbearable. But, I don’t know…

Ok, something needs to be done. My parents’ advice was: you need to
replace the wax ring, but you might as well replace the whole toilet
because who knows how old it is. If you have a new toilet
professionally installed, it’ll cost about twice as much, but it will
last for ages. This argument made sense to me, so I got on the task.

Well, ok, actually I still procrastinated for a while, because it
dried up again. But somewhere around the time that it happened again,
I made myself get on it. I called a random plumber in the yellow
pages, but she never got back with me. I eventually got a
recommendation from a friend at work. This guy was willing to talk
about it *over email*, I knew I had the right guy. He was very happy
to let me buy the toilet myself and he’d just install it. Great guy.

So, I went toilet shopping. Now, if you had asked me “do
home improvement stores sell toilets?” I would said “must be!” because
where else would everyone get them (and this is one of the very few
items that literally everyone needs). But I had never been in an
aisle of toilets that I could remember. Sure enough, though, I went
to Menards, and there were two aisles of toilets.

The bowls and the tanks are designed in pairs… or at least, each
company has some tanks designed to go with some bowls and vice-versa.
But they are sold separately. The cheapest, simplest toilet I could
find was about $90 for the pair. Ok, that’s the bottom end. What can
I get if I’m willing to spend more?

Well, according to the placards in the second aisle of toilets, the
big new word in toilets these days is “vacuum”. Manufacturers,
presumably trying to satisfy customers annoyed by the ineffectiveness
of most 1.6 gpf toilets, got to work redesigning the whole approach to
flushing. And the technology that seems to get the job done is a good
old vacuum. I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly how they
make this work, because I don’t. But the idea is clear: somehow they
get a very low pressure area behind the water and it sucks things
down. Well, that sound good to me! I found one pair for about $180,
made in the U.S.A, by Crane, a brand name of toilets I recognized
(presumably from well-placed advertising in urinals, etc.)

I really liked the guy that installed the toilet. Very chatty, very
willing to let me watch, very willing to answer questions and such.
And certainly seemed to know what he was doing. But, he didn’t seem
to know about the recent breakthroughs in toilet technology. When he
looked in the tank he said something like “now usually the machanism
for these things is already insta– WOAH! What is *this*??” I
explained that I had gotten something much more than the average
toilet here, he was quite curious. He seemed pretty skeptical,
actually. But, he certainly had no trouble figuring out what needed
to be done.

So, he did the work. If you’ve never seen a toilet being installed,
I’ve gotta say, it’s not nearly as gross as I expected it to be.
Somehow, I guess I pictured the hole in the floor being… well, an
outhouse. I don’t know how my brain did it, but somehow I had the
picture of a festering open pit of excrement being exposed by the
removal of the porcelain protector…. porcelain…. At the risk of
exposing my stupidity, I’ll admit that if someone said “hey I bought a
new set off porcelain plates” I’d expect them to look pretty nice.
Porcelain, as a word, makes me think of Victorian England for some
reason, be it justified or not. And that nice fancy ceramic was
turning the nasty shit-hole into something all civilized people
approve of having in their homes. That’s the way I subconsciously
pictured it in my brain.

Well, in case you had the same picture in your brain, let me ease your
mind a bit: with the toilet off it looks just about like any other
drain, like the one in your shower or bath tub. There’s nothing in it
at all (at least not as far down as I looked) and it looked downright
clean. Comforting. Actually, the only part about it that seemed a
little oogy was the wax seal, which was just a plain old gloppy mess
of wax (yes, apparently, no high-tech substances have replaced plain
wax for the dirty job of sealing your toilet bowl to the floor).

By the way, while he was removing the old toilet, he noted that the mechanism that I had installed was not properly tightened. “That’s where your leak is coming from” he said, without much doubt in his voice. This made sense, since it was something that had changed recently, and by a very fallible installer. It was also comforting, though, because it meant that this was all *unsoiled* water from the tank dripping onto the carpet. phew!

Anyway, out with the old, in with the new. New wax. New bowl. New tank.
New seat. Sit on it a while so that the bowl squishes the wax a bit
(no kidding). I let my plumber guy attach everything while I wasn’t
really paying attention. He eventually called me in saying “you might
not want to sit-and-flush with this thing…. unless you also want to
use it as a *bidet*”

I had to wonder if I ever sit and flush. I don’t know. One of those
things that once you’re thinking about it, it’s hard to remember what
feels natural. But anyway, I knew what he was talking about, and it
was even more evident when we did the first real flush.

VFWWWOOSHSHSHSHSH!!

Woah, I mean, seriously… like, picture a toilet on an airplane or
something. It was instantly clear that I’d never have to worry about
holding the handle down for a few seconds with this thing. In fact,
the installer advised me to be extra gentle with the handle because
that seemed like a possible point of long-term wear. But, yeah, this
thing FLUSHES.

And then, it refills the tank amazingly quickly. I haven’t done a lot
of measurements, but I’d guess that the tank stops sssssss’ing in
about the third of the time of a regular toilet like my old one. To
me, that suggests that it’s using a third of the water. Maybe, maybe
not. But, wow, I suspect that this thing is using considerably less
than 1.6 gallons per flush.

As one would expect, the bowl looks amazingly clean. I get the
impression that it will be easy to keep it that way, although that
reamains to be seen. All I know right now is that I (along with the
installer, who eventually used the word “enamoured” to describe his
feelings about it) think this thing is great. The night it was
installed, I caught myself drinking even more water than I usually do
because I was so excited to go and flush the toilet every time. And,
it never disappointed. I wondered, for a moment, if I’d feel stupid for installing this new $200 toilet after I was informed that my leak was do to a simple undertightened nut. But, as you can probably guess, I am not at all disappointed. As I look forward to a future with a reliably flushing toilet, I
must simply say to all you homeowners out there: “Go buy a toilet!!”