Toilets to Save Water

Toilets are by far the main source of water use in the home, accounting for nearly 30 percent of an average home’s indoor water consumption.

Older, inefficient toilets also happen to be a major source of wasted water in many homes.

Replacing these toilets with a low-flow would save nearly 11 gallons per toilet in your home every day!

Recent advancements have allowed toilets to use 20 percent less water than the current federal standard, while still providing equal or superior performance.

Over the course of your lifetime, you will likely flush the toilet nearly 140,000 times.

If you replace older, existing toilets with low-flush models, you can save 4,000 gallons per year with this simpler, greener choice.

And Price?

Low-flush toilets are available at a wide variety of price points and a broad range of styles.

EPA estimates that a family of four that replaces its home’s older toilets with low-flush models will, on average, save more than $90 per year in reduced water utility bills, and $2,000 over the lifetime of the toilets.

Additionally, in many areas, utilities and Government offer rebates and vouchers that can lower the price of a low-flush toilet.

Whether remodeling a bathroom, starting construction of a new home, or simply replacing an old, leaky toilet that is wasting money and water, installing a low-flow toilet is a high-performance, water-efficient option worth considering.

If every American home with older, inefficient toilets replaced them with newer low-flow toilets, we would save nearly 640 billion gallons of water per year, equal to more than two weeks of flow over Niagara Falls!

The silent toilet leak, which is most of the waste

A running toilet announces itself. The one that costs money does not make a sound.

A worn flapper lets water pass from the tank into the bowl continuously, and the fill valve quietly replaces it. There is no noise, nothing to see, and it can run for months.

The test takes ten minutes and costs nothing:

1. Put a few drops of food coloring into the tank, not the bowl

2. Do not flush

3. Wait fifteen to twenty minutes

4. If color has appeared in the bowl, water is passing through and the flapper is the repair

Do it on every toilet in the house. In a house with three, it is unusual for all three to pass.

What actually fails, in order

• The flapper. Rubber degrades, and chlorine tablets in the tank accelerate it considerably. This is the cheapest part in the toilet and the most common cause of waste

• The fill valve, which either runs on or fails to shut off cleanly

• The float adjustment, set so the water level sits above the overflow tube, meaning the tank drains into the overflow continuously

• The flush valve seat, which corrodes and stops sealing even with a new flapper

• The supply line at the wall, which is the one that fails catastrophically rather than slowly

That last one is worth a mention. A braided stainless supply line is inexpensive, and a failed plastic one while nobody is home is a water damage claim.

Replacing versus repairing

A toilet that leaks is usually a repair. A toilet that is old is usually a replacement, and the reason is volume rather than condition.

Older fixtures use several times the water per flush of a current one, and they do it every flush for the life of the house. On a fixture used many times a day, that difference accumulates faster than the cost of replacing it.

Two practical notes. A poorly chosen low-flow toilet that requires two flushes has saved nothing, so flush performance matters more than the label. And many water districts in this region have offered rebates toward high-efficiency fixtures, which changes the arithmetic.

The rest of the house

• Aerators on faucets, which are the cheapest fixture upgrade that exists

• Showerheads, where the good ones now deliver the same experience at much lower flow

• The water heater, and specifically how long the hot water takes to arrive, because all of that is water down the drain

• Outdoor hose bibs, which drip unnoticed because nobody looks at them

If hot water takes a long time to arrive at a fixture, that is a diagnosable problem rather than something to live with: hot and cold water repair.

The bigger reason this matters here

Southern California imports a large share of its water, and cost and restriction both move with drought. Efficiency installed once keeps working every year without anybody thinking about it, which is the opposite of how most conservation works.

Outdoors, the same logic applies at a larger scale, because landscape irrigation is typically the biggest single share of household use: irrigation and sprinkler systems.

Start with a free 15-minute call

Run the food coloring test first, then tell us how many toilets passed it, roughly how old the fixtures are, and whether the bill has changed without an explanation. In fifteen minutes we can usually tell you whether this is a flapper or a fixture.

Call (323) 651-0635 to book the free 15-minute consultation.

The Ultimate Pro, Inc. CA License 831700, Class B General Building. Serving Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties since 1996.