Day 85: Our Humble Commode

It's not too often you see someone getting very (or any) excited about a toilet, is it? Well if that doesn't sound like your thing, you may want to skip this post because there is a lot of that kind of excitement happening around these parts. We've crossed off another item on our ecoENERGY to-do list with the installation of our new "Ultra High Efficiency" toilet. The Proficiency is a 3 litre toilet designed right here in Ontario that is pretty much as efficient as it gets (so far) with regular flush toilets. And here it is in all its glory:

Just a toilet right? Fooled you.

Unlike regular toilets that flush using a siphon (i.e., pour enough water into the bowl to get it all out the siphon) or other recent water efficient toilets that use pressure-assist (i.e., water is pushed into the bowl from the tank - often creating quite a bit of noise in the process), the Proficiency uses a vacuum or suction (i.e., suck the water out of the bowl). The manufacturers explain it all with very fancy graphics here.

We first heard about this toilet at the REEP House for Sustainable Living, a demonstration house to showcase various "green" and energy/water efficient technologies. The toilet there was being used and hadn't presented any problems, but as an office space and education centre, it may not have been getting as much use as a home toilet would be. Digging around on The Internet, I stumbled upon this wonderfully informative and reassuring post and other positive reviews from homeowners who had installed it. A bit more investigation revealed that we could order in the elongated model from Home Hardware for the same price as the regular model and it would come with a soft close seat too. Score! Although the bathroom renos aren't happening right at this moment, we decided to go ahead and get the toilets ordered and installed in time for our post-evaluation to cash in on the $65 ecoENERGY rebate per toilet (in addition to the $20/toilet rebate that the Region is offering).

This task has been on the list for a while but with some extra long workdays for Garrett, me going to my new office on campus to work, and the last bit of packing up to do at the apartment, it wasn't looking like the funnest task. Last night, with an ounce more motivation than we've had of late (cue the cries from all of the half unpacked boxes scattered everywhere), we got down and dirty. Actually, it wasn't dirty at all and only took a couple of hours to do the replacement, start to finish.

So what does the inside of a 3L toilet look like?

Well, it's small.

The big difference is the extra chamber inside that creates the vacuum for the sucking (the good kind) power. And the big white plastic thing is for the flush - a button on top instead of the usual handle on the side. Once again, I'll refer you to the manufacturer's fancy pants graphics. Also, I just realized that the tank is actually so tiny that you can barely see it in that first photo.

I'm sure you're now thinking, "how great that it's environmentally friendly and a Canadian innovation and you seem pretty jazzed... but does it actually work well?" Short answer: yes. Very well. I was a bit worried that the small amount of water flowing through the bowl wouldn't be able to clear everything out. The toilet actually has a pretty high Miso Paste Maximum Performance (MaP) rating - a third-party program that uses soybean paste to test the flush power of toilets. (Check out some hilarious, but not browse-while-eating friendly, photos of their testing process.) Our elongated model actually has an 800 g rating compared to the regular model's 600 g rating. I'm sure this will come in handy for... you know...

Now if only we could hook it up to a greywater or rain water harvesting system. Ah, the dream. It'll happen one day, my friends. Maybe not this house and maybe not soon, but one day...

Anyways, that was a lot of words just to say that we've installed our new toilet and it's been working beautifully and we're excited to be rid of this 13L beast:

I could eat your kid for lunch.