With regard to toilets...
Saving water is a good thing. Saving water with devices that are unreliable and/or function poorly is not a good thing. In order to achieve a thorough toilet flush with little water, many toilet manufacturers make toilets with vacuum pumps or compressors to give some more power to the water. I do not like these devices! They are loud, expensive, trouble-prone, and cannot be easily or cheaply repaired. I believe that the toilet is something that the average person should be able to make basic repairs to under the most desperate of circumstances. Toilets always seem to break at the most inopportune moments, especially if you only have one of them! As a historic preservationist I have asked myself if the problem of increasing flush power has ever been solved before. It has been, over a century ago! The toilet tank was raised several feet above the bowl, and the water from the tank would be accelerated by gravity while descending a pipe before it hit the bowl, resulting in a powerful flush. Gravity is free, it is very reliable, has no moving parts, and if gravity ever breaks, flushing the toilet will be the least of our concerns! Maybe we should try to come up with the simplest viable soultion possible so we don't have to deal with shoddy products and get back to what we do best (laundry!).
Please don't skip the humor of the above. Humor mixed with facts is like using the expensive toilet paper; it makes a necessity a little more enjoyable and might even result in a better job in the end
Dave
Saving water is a good thing. Saving water with devices that are unreliable and/or function poorly is not a good thing. In order to achieve a thorough toilet flush with little water, many toilet manufacturers make toilets with vacuum pumps or compressors to give some more power to the water. I do not like these devices! They are loud, expensive, trouble-prone, and cannot be easily or cheaply repaired. I believe that the toilet is something that the average person should be able to make basic repairs to under the most desperate of circumstances. Toilets always seem to break at the most inopportune moments, especially if you only have one of them! As a historic preservationist I have asked myself if the problem of increasing flush power has ever been solved before. It has been, over a century ago! The toilet tank was raised several feet above the bowl, and the water from the tank would be accelerated by gravity while descending a pipe before it hit the bowl, resulting in a powerful flush. Gravity is free, it is very reliable, has no moving parts, and if gravity ever breaks, flushing the toilet will be the least of our concerns! Maybe we should try to come up with the simplest viable soultion possible so we don't have to deal with shoddy products and get back to what we do best (laundry!).
Please don't skip the humor of the above. Humor mixed with facts is like using the expensive toilet paper; it makes a necessity a little more enjoyable and might even result in a better job in the end
Dave
