Water Conservation Begins at Home - Think Twice, Flush Once!
In most homes, toilets are the largest water user inside the home. Although the federal Energy Policy Act of 1992 mandated a maximum of 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf) for new toilets beginning in 1994, many homes and apartments still have older toilets that might use 3.5-gpf or more. If you’re in an older home, get rid of that old flusher fast!
High efficiency toilets (HETs) use at least 20 percent less water than standard 1.6-gpf models. The most popular household HET is the dual-flush toilet. Dual-flush toilets use about 1.6-gpf for solids and 0.8 to 1.1-gpf for liquids. For a household of four people, the savings from a dual-flush toilet is about 3,360 gallons annually, reducing water use for sanitation by 37.5 percent and total household water consumption by 10 percent.
Nearly every toilet component, including the tank, flush valve, bowl rim and trapway, has been re-engineered using tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) computer modeling, making today’s models far more reliable than first generation HETs from the 1990s.
In the 1970s, during times of water shortages, a popular motto was, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down,” and everyone put bricks in their toilets to save water. Now, with dual-flush toilets, we can accomplish the same goal and not disrupt the flushing mechanism.
Dual-flush toilets potentially can save 25 percent or more of the water used in current flush-toilets and much more compared with older (pre-1992) models. Courtesy of Caroma.
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