Don’t Flush Your Money
Want to save some money on your water bill?
- Wash out an empty bottle … two liters or milk jugs work well
- Put a few rocks in it then fill the rest up with water
- Replace the cap and place it in your toilet tank
If there’s a significant difference in your toilet’s water pressure, just adjust the size of the bottle. Once you find the right balance, you’ll start using less water each time you flush … and you can repeat the process for each of your potties.
So what are you waiting for? Do a number (#2?) on that monthly bill!
June 13th, 2009 at 9:54 pm EST
Huh? What’s the science? Toilets are already mandated to be low-flow in the States.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:08 pm EST
Every time you flush your toilet, water refills it up to a certain height in the tank. If you put a milk jug in there, it displaces one gallon of the tank water … so when the tank refills the next time, it uses exactly one gallon less new water to refill the tank.
Right? Am I missing something?
June 15th, 2009 at 8:21 am EST
Yes, get your mind out of the toilet and CALL ME! (just kidding) MOM
June 17th, 2009 at 12:15 am EST
Toilet Science 101 :
Yes, Matt, modern Johns (or Janes maybe, if we want to be PC) are required to be low-flow. The engineers (maybe HP would be better at explaining how these things are calculated) determine how much water is actually required to wash down a “normal” load. The more force that can be exerted on the post-digested meal, the less water is needed for a given volume of doo. The design of the bowl is critical; a “swirly” flush is better than a straight dump.
Any deviation in bowl load from the “norm” creates a potential need for multiple flushes. Also, the texture of the load may introduce some unknowns. A liquid discharge (all urine) can be flushed with a simple replacement of the water in the bowl. Small nuggets may also be displaced with a small quantity of water. Placing large and/or very soft excreta in the bowl, together with numerous sheets of finely processed wood fiber, will require a greater volume of water than the “normal” load as anticipated by the engineers.
A typical modern toilet utilizes a 6 liter flush. With each flush, the tank is completely drained. By adding 2 liters of displacement inside the tank, the capacity is reduced to 4 liters. If the normal load for the user is small or mostly liquid, that may be adequate. If the user is a heavy hitter, or is fond of using lots of multi-layer paper, reducing the capacity to 4 liters may necessitate two or three flushes to render the bowl safe for pets to resume their drinking habits. Such a royal flush completely defeats the purpose of the fix.
Lance points out the need to calibrate the size of the flush. The caveat is that in doing so, the flush is recalibrated at a lower-then-design rate for the “normal” dump. The 6 liter flush has a bit of a buffer in case of a wide load, but under the fix, the buffer is eliminated.
Lance’s trick saves 2 liters per flush. If he flushes a dozen times a day, he will save 180 gallons of water a month. Or to put it another way, every third flush is free. However, every time he needs to double-flush (where before the fix a single pull of the lever would have worked), he uses 33% more water than an ordinary flush.
You need to figure out what a gallon of water costs, and then multiply that by the number of flushes per month and again by the number of liters/4 displaced by your bottles. We have assumed that Lance has a modern toilet. If he has an older model, one that uses 3 or so gallons per flush, his fix will save considerably more. In that case, though, he might be better off using a 1 gallon jug rather than two 1 liter bottles. If it is the tenant’s toilet, he will be better off in the long run (fewer calls to unplug the stool) if he just goes out and buys a modern toilet and forgets the cutesy environmentalism.
As a side note, the British seem to think that Americans are environmentally irresponsible because they rely on paper for their rebuttal, rather than washing away the residue with squirty nozzles. They would rather you saved trees than water. An outhouse saves lots of water. Old phone books can be recycled there. Unfortunately, outhouses are illegal now in most places in the US of A. You can’t please everyone.
June 17th, 2009 at 12:52 pm EST
Pretty long explanation… Pretty interesting, the topics that can send Willy to his typewriter for a dissertation…
What about setting the toilet to always flush at “#1″ volumes (via Lance’s milk jug method) and use the flush handle ONLY for #1’s, and keep a 2 gallon bucket of water handy to dump in the bowl (pun intended) for a manual flush after every #2???
And we haven’t even TOUCHED on the shelf toilets I had to use in Germany, or the squatty potties in China…
June 17th, 2009 at 2:30 pm EST
I think I actually have a better idea. Buckets tend to spill. You could install multiple tanks overhead, like the old British loos. Each would hold a different volume of water. Tank #1 for #1, tank #2 for #2, tank #3 for really heavy loads. Choose the appropriate tank lever after checking your load.
But hey, what do I know, I just run a chocolate factory.
June 17th, 2009 at 7:41 pm EST
Do you guys really poop that much? Seriously … even after a full load, my toilet has no problem flushing with the gallon jug inside.
Haha … case (or lid?) closed!
June 18th, 2009 at 1:18 pm EST
I REALLY like Willy’s idea, and I bet BO would too! Might as well paint the tanks green!
And Lance, you’ve never SEEN a full load until you’ve seen one of mine…