WSJ -- High-Pressure Toilets Shake Up Bathrooms
December 18, 2002
High-Pressure Toilets Shake Up Bathrooms
By JOE BARRETT
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sanya Dunn has some unusual advice for first-time visitors to her home: Don't be afraid of the toilet.
"It's kind of loud, and it can scare them," says the 37-year-old homemaker and animal-rescue volunteer in Upland, Calif. "You can't prepare them enough."
Plumber Norm Block of Wynnewood, Pa., has clients who should have heeded those words. A few years ago, they ended up in the emergency room with a visiting elderly aunt after her first trip to the bathroom. She had reached back to flush the toilet before getting up from the stool, he says. Big mistake. "She thought the thing was exploding," Mr. Block says. "She fell off the toilet and right into the tub," breaking a kneecap.
[Sanya Dunn]
A new type of toilet is shaking things up in bathrooms across the country. Equipped with something the industry calls "pressure-assisted flushing systems," the toilets use a burst of compressed air to force water through the bowl. Powerful and conservation-minded, they are now in more than 3.5 million homes and offices. They have just one drawback: a startlingly loud flush.
Ask John Dusbabek. His 19-month-old son, Paul, loved to flush the toilet in the family's old apartment. But when the Dusbabeks moved into a new place this summer, Paul got a rude surprise. "He screamed and cried the first couple of times," says Mr. Dusbabek, a 26-year-old computer-science student and restaurant manager in Provo, Utah.
Even now, the Dusbabeks have to be careful about when they flush. "It still wakes our son up from naps," says Mr. Dusbabek's wife, Elicia, who is 25.
Even those who have been warned can emerge from the bathroom a little rattled. "The whole flushing thing is like a hurricane," says Carolyn Arabatzis, a 34-year-old manager for Ernst & Young in Capistrano Beach, Calif., who has used Ms. Dunn's toilet at parties. "It's not calming at all. People don't want to be overwhelmed in the bathroom."
Manufacturers say that the latest generation of pressure-assisted devices release water more gradually and work in commodes designed to dampen the sound, making some even quieter than traditional toilets. But the vast majority of existing pressure-assisted toilets from such major manufacturers as Kohler, American Standard and Universal-Rundle are much noisier than old-fashioned gravity toilets.
"You can very quickly tell the difference between a pressure-assist and a gravity flush," says Paul DeBoo, sales manager for the biggest maker of the devices, the Flushmate division of Sloan Valve Co. in Lincoln Park, Ill. "You have to assess your own needs."
Some people think a little noise is worth the powerful flush. "It'll suck a cat down it," says Kevin Sanders, 40, of Big Lake, Alaska, 75 miles north of Anchorage. He has two of the toilets, including one outside his master bedroom. "It sounds like a turbo going off inside the bathroom," he says. "But you can't hear it outside the bathroom."
Three years ago, Ms. Dunn's husband, Andy, was at a convention in Las Vegas when he encountered his first pressure-assisted toilets at the Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino. "It was like the space shuttle flew over," he says.
Lifting the Lid
Curious, the 37-year-old Internet consultant and entrepreneur lifted the lid on the tank. Instead of water and a floating ball, he saw a mysterious black cylinder with the words Sloan Flushmate, an 800 phone number and a Web-site address.
Back home, he looked up the Web site and eventually ordered two Gerber Ultra Flush toilets through a local distributor. "It's a louder toilet," he says. "But I like it because it sounds like it's working."
Ever since Congress passed a water-conservation law that required new toilets to meet a tough 1.6-gallon-per-flush standard by 1994, people have complained. Initially, many of the new toilets were simply modified versions of the older 3.5- to 5-gallon models. With less water, they just didn't work as well. They often required multiple flushes -- and keeping a plunger handy. More recently, manufacturers have improved their designs, using larger passageways and squeezing every advantage they can out of the power of swirling water.
When the industry had more water to work with, toilet building was "a relatively inexact science," says Kathryn Streeby, product manager for the toilet division of Kohler Co. in Kohler, Wis. Now, Kohler toilets are designed on computers at the company's Fluid Dynamics Research Lab. "It's become a very exact science," she says.
Still, most toilets in homes today work on generally the same principle as the one invented by Sir John Harington, a 17th-century English courtier and wit, who once presented one to Queen Elizabeth. Water stored in a cistern is released into a bowl, flushing away the waste. (Thomas Crapper, the British plumber who is popularly credited with the invention, lived in the 19th century and obtained three patents on various aspects of water-closet technology.)
Commercial toilets -- the kind found in schools, office buildings and apartments -- take advantage of the 1-inch pipes in those types of buildings to deliver their powerful flush. Airline toilets, also noisy flushers, use an electrically powered vacuum to suck away waste. Another new product available for homes, the vacuum-assisted toilet, uses a pump inside the tank to pull water out of the bowl.
A Powerful Punch
Pressure-assisted toilets -- which start at around $200, compared with about $115 for a typical workhorse toilet -- look like regular tank toilets. When their internal chamber fills with water, it traps compressed air inside. The trapped air forces the water through the bowl at a peak rate of 70 gallons per minute, or about three times as fast as a traditional toilet and twice the rate of commercial toilets, according to Flushmate. The entire flush takes less than four seconds, compared with up to 15 seconds for a gravity toilet. And the pressure-assisted toilets use only 1.4 gallons of water, compared with 1.6 gallons for the latest gravity toilets.
When the water-conservation law first hit the books, pressure-assisted-toilet sales took off. But there were problems with some of the early models. Kohler developed a model that had a tendency to crack at the seams, sometimes sending porcelain flying. A Kohler spokeswoman says the company quickly discontinued that line and will replace toilets that have problems on a case-by-case basis. Flushmate, too, has recalled some units to avoid "damage to the toilet fixture, any collateral damage, or the possibility of personal injury," according to the company's Web site. Both companies say there have been no injuries to date.
Many owners of pressure-assisted toilets are still the only ones in their neighborhood with a model, making them a constant source of conversation. "No one doesn't notice it," says Mr. Sanders, who manages a team of technicians for General Communications Co. of Anchorage.
"I'm very frustrated with noise," says engineer Bruce Martin, 68, who invented the first successful pressure-assisted toilet in the early 1970s. He sold the product to Sloan in 1986 and went on to roll out a competing product, the PF/2, in 1997. His company was recently acquired by Geberit AG of Switzerland with plans to go global.
New fixtures will soon make the PF/2 as quiet as most gravity toilets, he says. "Then no one will notice it," he says. "That's my goal."
Write to Joe Barrett at joseph.barrett@wsj.com
Updated December 18, 2002
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