New toilets don’t have any problems with water efficiency. All toilets that are manufactured today are low flush, meaning they need only a few liters of water to flush down our urine or poop. But what will you do if you have an old toilet? Replacing it with a low-flush toilet can be costly. What can you do to reduce the water your old toilet is using?
Every time you flush, at least 6 liters of clean water is used. If you are using an old toilet, you can be using at most 4 gallons of water every flush. That’s clean water. How to save water? It’s simple. Flush only when you need to. Flush when the odor in the bathroom is unbearable. Flush after you pooped of course. But you don’t need to flush the toilet when you threw a tissue in it or if your urine is not yellowish or not smelly.
For those who have older toilets, you can reduce the quantity of water in the tank by displacing it. All you have to do is place a half-a-gallon plastic container filled with pebbles inside the tank. This way the tank will be filled with half the quantity of water as when there’s no displacement. This will be a water efficient toilet.
For most older models of toilets, this is effective. But there are others that don’t flush out all the urine or poop with a smaller amount of water. If this is the case, then it is time to upgrade to a low-flush toilet. It is costly but if you think about the savings that you will have in your water bill for years and years to come, it’s worth it.
If the water in your toilet tank is leaking, you are wasting hundreds of gallons of water every week. How to know if your toilet is leaking? Just drop some food color to the water inside the tank. Check if the water inside the bowl is colored after a few minutes. If it does, your toilet is leaking and you need to call your plumber.
I don’t know how much water is used for the toilet flushing in the Philippines but I read that almost 5 billion gallons of water is used for the flushing of toilets in the US. If the Philippines have 50 million toilets and each toilet is used 5 or more times every day, we can save a LOT if we just make sure we have water efficient toilets.
You must log in to post a comment.