Bath Products Review: Low-Flow ToiletsTechnology Rules: Engineering improvements lead to toilets that are better-performing and save water, too.

Technology is a beautiful thing. Over the past 15 years, it's taken music-listening from Walkmans to iPods, video gaming from Atari to Xbox, and low-flow toilets from nuisance to nirvana.

OK, maybe nirvana is stretching things a bit. But just about everyone in the plumbing industry can agree on one thing: Low-flow toilets have come a long way since the early '90s, when the Energy Policy Act set a national manufacturing standard of 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf). Those first low-flow designs got things off to a bad start, as consumers found themselves doing a two-flush tango with their new toilets. So much for saving water.

“The products work much better today than when they were first introduced, so consumers obviously like that,” says Bob Anderson, construction manager at Stylecraft Builders in College Station, Texas. “However, there is still a stigma attached to the low-flow toilets that is taking time to change.”

The latest crop of water-saving toilets should do a lot to soften that stigma. Improvements have been made in both the basic technologies—pressurized tanks and non-pressurized or gravity-tank systems. The low-flow toilets of today are much more effective than those first covered on the pages of BUILDING PRODUCTS just after its founding in 1990.

“More engineering has been applied, so they've all gotten better,” says Don Arnold, a plumbing consultant whose Gurnee, Ill., firm, Inter/Source, specializes in new product development and training. “Probably the more significant improvements have come on the gravity side.”

Toto, a leader in gravity-fed systems, recently came out with a toilet that employs what it calls a Double Cyclone Flush Engine, which further improves upon its well-known GMax flushing system.

Three actions kick in with the Double Cyclone flush. A primary nozzle, located at the back of the bowl, fires a high-speed stream of water that scours the rim and initiates the water's cyclone movement. A second nozzle, located behind the first, fires a second high-speed water jet around the redesigned bowl's concave rim, providing a 360-degree rim and bowl cleansing. At the same time, the siphon jet harnesses the accelerating power of this rapidly rotating column of water for speedy waste removal. But this enhanced technology comes at a higher price, of course.

Manufacturers also have taken steps to ease the installation of low-flow toilets. As a way of field-testing its new Titan model, Eljer paid for all 50 of its Dallas employees to have a Titan installed at home. “Some of us are handy, so we put them in ourselves,” says Frank Vullo, Eljer's director of product management. “But we had a lot of contractors install them, too, and every single one of them was just thrilled with them.”

Now that so many kinks have been engineered out of the basic operation and installation of low-flow toilets, plumbing experts suggest that the next most logical steps revolve around conserving even more water. The push is coming from Western states where water is scarce and municipalities are moving to implement even more stringent water conservation measures.

According to a recent California Department of Water Resources study, households use an average of 148 gallons of water per day (or 54,020 gallons per year). In an older home with four traditional (3.5-gpf) toilets, that means 50.8 percent of the water use comes just from toilets. Switching to high-efficiency toilets could mean saving 17,958 gallons of water per year.