Regular readers may be aware of my inordinate interest in toilet smuggling. It has everything: bureacratic boondoggles, free market capitalism, and even a little adventure. Well, it looks like a high tech company has solved the problem of the ecotoilet - sort of.
Sanya Dunn has some unusual advice for first-time visitors to her home: Don't be afraid of the toilet.Hot dang, an exploding toilet! If that doesn't give you constipation, nothing will! Of course the flush noise may be the cure for that.
"It's kind of loud, and it can scare them," says the 37-year-old homemaker and animal-rescue volunteer in Upland, Calif. "You can't prepare them enough."
Plumber Norm Block of Wynnewood, Pa., has clients who should have heeded those words. A few years ago, they ended up in the emergency room with a visiting elderly aunt after her first trip to the bathroom. She had reached back to flush the toilet before getting up from the stool, he says. Big mistake. "She thought the thing was exploding," Mr. Block says. "She fell off the toilet and right into the tub," breaking a kneecap.
A new type of toilet is shaking things up in bathrooms across the country. Equipped with something the industry calls "pressure-assisted flushing systems," the toilets use a burst of compressed air to force water through the bowl. Powerful and conservation-minded, they are now in more than 3.5 million homes and offices. They have just one drawback: a startlingly loud flush.
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Some people think a little noise is worth the powerful flush. "It'll suck a cat down it," says Kevin Sanders, 40, of Big Lake, Alaska, 75 miles north of Anchorage. He has two of the toilets, including one outside his master bedroom. "It sounds like a turbo going off inside the bathroom," he says. "But you can't hear it outside the bathroom."
Three years ago, Ms. Dunn's husband, Andy, was at a convention in Las Vegas when he encountered his first pressure-assisted toilets at the Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino. "It was like the space shuttle flew over," he says.
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Ever since Congress passed a water-conservation law that required new toilets to meet a tough 1.6-gallon-per-flush standard by 1994, people have complained. Initially, many of the new toilets were simply modified versions of the older 3.5- to 5-gallon models. With less water, they just didn't work as well. They often required multiple flushes -- and keeping a plunger handy. More recently, manufacturers have improved their designs, using larger passageways and squeezing every advantage they can out of the power of swirling water.
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Pressure-assisted toilets -- which start at around $200, compared with about $115 for a typical workhorse toilet -- look like regular tank toilets. When their internal chamber fills with water, it traps compressed air inside. The trapped air forces the water through the bowl at a peak rate of 70 gallons per minute, or about three times as fast as a traditional toilet and twice the rate of commercial toilets, according to Flushmate. The entire flush takes less than four seconds, compared with up to 15 seconds for a gravity toilet. And the pressure-assisted toilets use only 1.4 gallons of water, compared with 1.6 gallons for the latest gravity toilets.
When the water-conservation law first hit the books, pressure-assisted-toilet sales took off. But there were problems with some of the early models. Kohler developed a model that had a tendency to crack at the seams, sometimes sending porcelain flying. A Kohler spokeswoman says the company quickly discontinued that line and will replace toilets that have problems on a case-by-case basis. Flushmate, too, has recalled some units to avoid "damage to the toilet fixture, any collateral damage, or the possibility of personal injury," according to the company's Web site. Both companies say there have been no injuries to date.
