Toilet specs

Part of the renovation effort for This Odd House involves remodeling the second floor bathroom.  Access to it required a traverse to the back of the kitchen and through a door into a long windowless room.  Yes, it had vaulted ceilings with speakers, a phone jack, and light bulbs arranged as the Pleides star cluster, but still, despite the plumbing efficiency, it just seemed awkward to me that the bathroom door was in the kitchen.

The plan is to condense the oversized bathroom into a slightly smaller space, and provide hallway access from the rest of the second floor without interrupting the cooks in the kitchen.  As usual, this is easy to describe, but hard to implement.

Any rearrangement of plumbing fixtures will arouse the interests of the city, which takes a responsibility for preventing unsafe living conditions.  There are plenty of ways to screw up while building a house, resulting in hazards not just to the occupants, but also to neighbors and entire communities.   As a result, rules have been put in place that are intended to prevent sewer backups, water supply contamination, gas leaks, electrical fires, and building collapse.

It is hard to make simple rules that apply universally, but the building and construction codes are an attempt to do so, and even though we are sometimes annoyed at our obligations to the other people we share the land with, and especially the city government that we have authorized to have authority over us in this activity, I endorse the goals and objectives that the covenants and codes try to support.

In the case of bathroom remodeling, there are limits to how far the water supply and drain lines can be from the fixtures.  And if a toilet is being installed, it must meet the modern requirements for water usage.  Flush toilet technology has advanced considerably from its first widespread promotion , and our concern for water conservation has increased as well.  New toilets in Minneapolis (and the entire U.S. for that matter) must be rated better (less than) 1.6 gpf (gallons per flush).  The toilets in This Odd House were 5 gallon monsters.

Well, I’m ok with replacing the old toilet.  In fact, I’d like to replace all of them in TOH.  Having been spoiled by modern toilets in suburbia for the last twenty years, I had found the stools in TOH to be rather low and compact, and, how can I say this delicately?,  less than optimal, even inadequate, for my specific Nordic anatomy.

So I thought it would be a simple matter to tell the plumber to install new modern 1.6 gpf (with elongated bowl) toilets.  I should have known better.  In an age where Malcom Gladwell can explain why there are dozens of different spaghetti sauce offerings  from the same vendor, and a hundred square feet of shelf space can be devoted to toothpaste variants, it was only reasonable that specifying a toilet would require more than my simple description.

I did some research.  Consumer reports actually conducted tests on toilets , and I discovered that they could be rated on many measures.  I need to select from “pressure assisted” to “gravity feed” (I think this is the classic design), and assess their tests for “Solid waste removal:  The ability to move simulated waste through the bowl and trap”, noise, water consumption, and “bowl cleaning”.  And cost, of course.

I settled on one recommended by CU, the Gerber Avalanche 21-818.   With a name like this I would not expect it to be quiet, but it was rated well on this scale.  I read reviews of other toilets that warned of quiet flushing followed by loud desperate gurgles at the end of the discharge.   I hope this is not the case for this model.  Unfortunately, I don’t get to try before I buy on this item.

Toilets are ordered and will be installed soon.  I will provide a review only by popular, insistent demand.