Tired of wasting tons of water every time you flush your toilet? Not interested in trading out a perfectly good toilet, albeit a water guzzling one, for one of the new low flow dual flush ones? Have I got the answer for you. Perusing the plumbing section of our local large hardware store last week I stumbled upon a great find. There is a product by HydroRight called the Total Toilet Repair Kit. This takes any standard toilet that you have and turns it into a low flow dual flush toilet for under $20! This is a great way to reduce what could be one of the largest water hogs in your house depending on how old it is.
Older toilets moved a lot of water to insure that it achieves a complete flush. Regulations in recent years have gotten the total gallons per flush down from 3.5 gallons for the 1980’s toilets to 1.6 gallons for today’s WaterSense (like Energy Star but for products that use water instead of electricity) toilets. The problem has always been that changing the amount of water your toilet used either involved filling the tank with bricks or changing out the whole toilet. The bricks seemed like an incomplete solution and tossing a functioning toilet into the landfill seems wasteful.
This repair kit allows you to change out the internal flushing mechanism without changing out the whole toilet while still achieving the low flow goals. The kit works great on most toilets. If you have a Mansfield one you will need one additional part and the installation is a little more complicated.
The kit comes with great instructions and my handy husband says that on a scale of 0 to 10 he would give it a 2 for ease of installation if you only need the parts provided in the kit. If you have experience changing out parts inside your toilet, this kit will not be too difficult for you. However, if you have the Mansfield style toilet (read the instructions on the box) then installing the additional part means you will have to remove the tank portion of the toilet from the base to make the installation and that he would then give it a 5 or a 6 on the ease of installation scale. Removing the tank requires larger tools that you may or may not have, complicating the process.
After installation we had to haul the kids into the bathroom and have a lesson on how to flush the toilet with the dual flush buttons. The kids were not amused. I am very happy though. The number one flush moves only a tiny amount of water, which is precisely what I wanted. The number two button moves a considerable amount more but still less than my 1.6 gallon toilet was moving before the installation. I could easily read how much water my toilet was moving before my looking at the water fill lines inside the tank of the toilet while I was watching it operate.
So maybe this won’t save the world, but it just might save my drainfield, or just make it last longer. Don’t you just love saving stuff? If you are interested you can watch a video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-flEtWpFl4
